as part of the blog I setup to host my conversations with the arts community, I embedded images pulled from flickr. This is set to load the 3 latest images that were geo-tagged with being from Portland and would auto change, so only the latest 3 images showed and I find they were being continuously updated.
A photographer who had posted onto their flickr page and tagged it with Portland thus showed up on my site and they have complained I have infringed their copyright. What do you think, have I?
I have changed the image categories I was linking to so that this person’s images no longer showed. And apologised to the person. But I was wondering;
1. Technically have I in fact infringed their copyright?
I have not downloaded their image. I have not specifically chosen their image. It is embedded into my site from their page on flickr, thus if someone clicks on the image from my site they go to the photographers page (and thus find out more about this persons work).
2. generally is it wrong to use this type of embedded random image loading?
For me personally I would not be concerned and in fact welcome the extra exposure it might gain my work. In fact that is why I stick images up onto flickr. If I had the skill I would change the code used to grab these images to include authors name. But is this just my openness to use of my work.
I’d welcome your thoughts on this. You can see the changing images on the site http://creativedialog.wordpress.com
