Update on the MoD Complaint About Me

Back at the end of January, I received a rather bizarre rejection on a Zazzle product.

I'd created it using an image of HMS Edinburgh, which I'd taken in Lyme Regis last year.  Zazzle wrote to say that the UK Secretary of State for Defence had a problem with that. They alone held the copyright for such things. 

I wasn't having a good day at the time, so took exception to this.  I complained to the Ministry of Defence about their complaint, ccing my own MP along the way.

I've finally received a response.  I did have a kind of holding e-mail before, from my MP, telling me that it was all being looked into.  But then a three page letter appeared on my doorstep.  It was the correspondence between my MP and Philip Dunne, the Secretary of State for Defence.

The latter denied ever telling Zazzle to remove my product.  He did say that his department had stepped in before, when other people's products reproduced the MoD's trademarks.  But on this occasion, no laws had been broken and no action was required.  I was free to take as many pictures of HMS Edinburgh as I wanted, and shove them on all the products I could create.

I've just let Zazzle know, having scanned in and attached all three pages of the letter.  You have to feel sorry for that poor company.  They were obviously just trying to cover their backs, after my government had slapped them before, but ended up caught between me on a bad day and the MoD again.

Let's see how that one pans out then.

But while we're on the subject of Zazzle, let me take this moment to big up one of my latest ventures.  I've created a website to cover my Beautiful Britain store.  I'd be really thrilled, if you'd take a look.

Complaint About Me - from the UK Secretary of State for Defence

I've been in some weird situations in my time, but this one pushed the boat out a little further than usual.

As many of you know, I've created a Zazzle store.  Originally it was to furnish monetised pictures for articles on places like Wizzley.  As time has gone on, I've grown to love the site.  I'm not exactly a visual person, so my comfort zone is in words.  Zazzle is all pictures.  Nevertheless, extra strings to my bow were added with aplomb.

Then representatives of the UK Secretary of State for Defence complained about me.  Apparently.  They demanded that a photograph that I'd taken of HMS Edinburgh be removed for copyright reasons.  I took the photograph.  It's the one pictured above.

I admit that my jaw dropped a tad, as I read the e-mail from Zazzle's Content Review Team.  The products made from it had been up less than 24 hours, when the Defence Department leapt upon it.  Naturally, I felt a letter to my MP and to the Rt Hon Philip Hammond coming on.  They were e-mailed just now.

The precise wording, in the Zazzle e-mail, was thus:

'We have been contacted by legal and commercial rights representatives of The UK Secretary of State for Defence, and at their request, to remove designs which infringe upon their rights from the Zazzle Marketplace.'

But surely, as a British taxpayer, it could be argued that I paid for HMS Edinburgh.  At least, I paid my taxes and a Destroyer was added to the Royal Navy using tax revenue.  I'm not saying that I could direct its manoeuvres, but there is a link here.  Also as a British taxpayer, any income I receive from the Zazzle products will be taxed too.  That's more money in the coffers to build military battleships!

Actually, put like that, it's probably for the best that the Secretary of State for Defence is wasting time and resources firing pot-shots at British businesses.  It stops them being diverted into wars, which aren't supported by the British people instead.

I'd be interested to read the response from Mr Hammond.  I'll keep you posted.

As a faintly amusing coda, another image of HMS Edinburgh, which was posted on the same day, same hour, same folder and sat right next to the one removed, was patently deemed admissible.   It's still there.

Returned from Cuba

Let the blogging commence!

The Importance of a Picture: Using Creative Commons 3 to Get the Word Out

Publicity is the key to success for any event, be it a garden fete or a mass protest in the streets of New York. But those wishing to achieve it often overlook a tiny detail - the licence designation on their photographs. For those with a controversial cause, it can make the difference between a sympathetic article reaching readers in time or negative responses too late in the day.

This is an insight into an all too common scenario, which played out this morning.

Finding an Image for #OccupyWallStreet

It was September 17th 2011. For weeks the social networking feeds had been buzzing with the Adbuster arranged activism that was taking place this day. Anonymous were on board, as were US Day of Rage and other groups. There were publicity posters, leaflets, photographs and other images all over the internet. Many were produced by hacktivists with the full implication that they could be reused by whomever had such inclination.

As a journalist and a writer for Suite101, I set out to produce an article. I wanted it to published well before noon GMT, the proposed time that the protest was taking place. There was method in my madness. When ordinary New Yorkers stumbled across the event, they would want information. I wanted my article to be ready and waiting, in Google News, for just an occurance.

But there was a problem. Not one of the mass of images on the internet specially carried a Creative Commons 3 licence. This allows for commercial reuse and Suite101, mindful of law suits, demands it. They have advertisements on the site, which counts as commercialisation. Without an image, my article could not be published.

The Devil is in the Detail

There is an old adage, purportedly from the Battle of Bosworth and Richard III's alleged cry, 'My kingdom for a horse.' (Historically inaccurate; Shakespeare made it up.) It goes: 'For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the kingdom was lost.' It felt like a very apt saying this morning.

I've been here before. I've had articles in mind, then searched for an image, as I know I'll need one. There aren't any with the status, 'for commercial reuse', so I don't bother with the article. I move on to something that I can illustrate. But I felt that the occupation of Wall Street was important. I wanted to write about this.

For the best part of an hour, I searched websites and blogs for that all important Creative Commons 3 tag. None of them included it. It was seen as implicit that the images could be used. My editor wasn't going to see it that way. All the time, the clock was ticking. The protest would have started before I got this up. In desperation, I Tweeted owners of likely images. They weren't online.

Meanwhile, news articles were starting to spring up. They were from mainstream news outlets, like Fox and CNN, who could afford to have photographers on the scene. Small indpendents, like myself, are so reliant on participants. We don't have the big business funding that they have, to use in our coverage of anti-big business protests.

Educating Anonymous and Sourcing an Image

Fortunately, I did have one more avenue to try. After having now wasted an hour on trying to source an image, I decided to be cheeky. A few days ago, AnonCMD had sent me a link for an Anonymous IRC Channel. It was meant to be used to interview AnonCMD about RefRef, but they didn't show up. I used the same link now, in the hope that other members of Anonymous were around. After all, these hacktivists were responsible for half of the pictures I'd found.

True to their nature, the resulting conversation was placed in Pastebin by Anonymous. After hearing me out, one of them then took my favoured image and stuck a notice on it: 'for commercial reuse'. I had my illustration!

However, it had taken so long to find, that I was now just an hour away from the start of the protest. I wrote and researched fast. It wasn't quite as well crafted as it might have been, if I had twice the time in which to pen it.

Publicising the Protest with a Picture and an Article

My article went live at ten minutes past noon. Anonymous Amongst Protestors in Occupy Wall Street Demonstration carried with it the image kindly created for me by a member of Anonymous.

The timing (and the fact that Anonymous subsequently Tweeted it through dozens of their channels) was critical. For a start, it pushed my article to the top of those listed in Google News, above heavyweights like CNN and the Huffington Post:

In short, it was the first option available for ordinary people searching for news about the protest in Wall Street; and it was sympathetic to the demonstration.

Moreover, within minutes, it had been collected by the New York Daily News, a Paper.li, edition. It was featured, because it had an image.

So mine was the version of events that New Yorkers were reading on Paper.li. Just an hour and half after the article was published, it has been already been read by 551 people.

What Can People do to Facilitate These Kind of News Stories

Bear in mind that journalists like myself are bound by the rules of our publishers. We can't put articles out without images; and we need somewhere to prove to our editors that the images are 'for commercial reuse'.

When putting out pictures, all that is required is a simple line beneath them, or somewhere in the blog entry: 'This content/image/photo/poster is licenced under Creative Commons [add which one]'. For commercial reuse, the following are applicable:

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-ND 3.0)

Just find the one you prefer, then link it somewhere in the vicinity of the images that can be used. It doesn't necessarily have to be in the picture itself, as we can link back to the source for the licence attribution.

Finally, thank you very much to the good people of Anonymous, who took the time to create an image for me this morning. Good luck with the #OccupyWallStreet demonstration.

Preparing for Riot: Photographs from Walsall, 9 August 2011

Walsall felt tense today. Despite internet rumours, there had not been any of the rioting that plagued nearby Birmingham the night before. However, everyone seemed to think that there would be.

Gangs of pubescent kids hung around outside the Saddler's Centre, watching the High Street. They appeared excited, waiting for it all to kick off. All along the shopping centre, members of staff or security guards stood in doorways. At the first sign of trouble, they would be dashing inside to sound the alarm. Nobody could miss the police. They stood in groups or in pairs, highly visible, just a few yards between each cohort. Only the officers appeared relaxed. "There has been no trouble here. We've been here all day and nothing." One told me. "Lots of kids thinking there's something to see, but there really isn't."

That was true. Unlike Birmingham, no shop frontages were boarded up here. No massive clean-up operation had needed to take place. But while rumours abounded, then the police (and the young onlookers cloistered close to them) were out in force. While Birmingham had seemed quite relaxed, there was a palpable air of tension in Walsall.

Here are the photographs from Walsall's town centre, taken this afternoon.

(Thank you to Miyamashi, for helping me select the photographs. I really did take a lot!)

Photos After the August 2011 Birmingham Riots

I was in Birmingham City Centre today. Last night (August 8th 2011), 800 rioters rampaged through these streets. They out-numbered the police 2 to 1 and mostly raided shops. It was fairly obvious, from looking at the damage, that these were people after all they could steal. This wasn't a political protest, though the recession and the decisions of politicians could well be underlying causes.

Strolling through, Birmingham felt relaxed. There were police everywhere you looked; as well as hordes of workers, boarding up smashed windows and sweeping the streets. That is the story of the city at the moment - police and those securing the properties. By relaxed, I meant that no-one was rioting and there was not an air of tension.

As for the people, the majority were incredulous, staring, taking pictures, shaking their heads and telling anyone who'd listen that this isn't right. One thing that struck me was the dissociation between ordinary Brummie and those who had rioted. "Why would they do this?" "What were they after?" "It looks like they were after 'phones and clothes." Nowhere was it 'us'. No-one was owning the rioters. They were other, distinct, not people from Birmingham.

The destruction had been more apparent, earlier in the day, but council workers, staff from businesses and a broom wielding army of people from Twitter's @RiotCleanUp had already been in. They had done the city proud.

Here are some pictures of Birmingham City Centre, all taken during the afternoon of August 9th 2011, in the aftermath of the riot.

(With much thanks to Miyamashi, for helping me whittle down these from 177 images.)