1 Adventure

Image Stealing On MySpace.com & Use Of Images From This Photography Blog

Notice to Myspace Users:Okay, first off let it be known that I enjoy the fact that people on the internet/myspace are loving the photos I take and sharing them with others. Please continue using the images on myspace and other social networking websites ONLY, but consider giving providing credit to this blog (see below). By using the images you agree to these terms.

So MySPACE.com....listen up! You eat my bandwidth like a kid just home from fat camp. I have monitored the use of my images on myspace, xanga, friendster, etc.. for the last several months and at first it wasn't a problem until I had to pay extra $$$ bandwidth charges from my hosting company. Ekk!

They like them so much I know have to say something. Nothing makes me happier to know that people like what I am doing and wanting to make it part of their lives. I created this blog in order to share some of the photography I do and have been doing so successfully for over 3 years. I am not one of those people that insanely protects every image they take, nor am I greedy about letting people use images on their sites, and I charge very reasonable rates for people who wish to use the images commercially. I never planned to use watermarks on any of my images. So might consider that a bad idea. But I have trust in human nature and also know there really isnt anything on here someone would want to exploit extensively.

So What Are People Doing?

Essentially they are using Google Images or Yahoo Image search to find pictures they like and then hyperlinking to them in their myspace profile with a service like Strikefile MySpace Editor. Easy enough, just insert the url, they give you some fancy code you can insert into your profile.

The Data Doesn't Lie

This is a screen shot of myspace traffic from August 2006. You will see that in August the images being used received 34,893 hits, not including all the other social networking sites and individual pages pulling the images. That's pretty considerable! That's awesome!

So What Am I Going To Do?

Well, not that much at this point. I will ask that anyone that wish to use images off this website for myspace please link back to this website with the following code. Insert code into your myspace profile personality or interest sections:

I used free images from Ben Pfeiffer's 1 Adventure Photography Blog

Which looks like:

I used free images from Ben Pfeiffer's 1 Adventure Photography Blog

I don't consider it a big deal, I think its nice to have some good photography on myspace as opposed to the junk I usually see. Myspace is hard on the eyes anyway, so by all means continue to use the images. Some images however I will be watermarking in order to get credit for some of the images. There are two images in particular that are the most popular. These are probably two of some of my most popular images on the net. The New York City Lights are extremely popular. They have even been used in a recent publication pamplet for promotion of Broadway in Nashville and several other publications.

Some example profiles of kid's using my images.

http://www.myspace.com/jaredesgordo
http://www.myspace.com/treehugger7
http://myspace.com/thefivemantrio (this is a myspace band page)
http://myspace.com/left_steve
http://www.myspace.com/mikestheman20
http://www.myspace.com/jesschelle (this girl really likes the city lights photos)
http://www.myspace.com/theistic_dreamer (this guy has a really interesting profile with one of my homeless person photos)
http://www.myspace.com/quirkykirky456
http://www.myspace.com/afatalromance (bizarre page)