This relates to an incident that took place a week ago, but I've let it rest for a while. As some people know, I went on the Naked European Walking Tour this year (with a pre-trip trip and a post-trip trip also), and I've been posting my photos from that journey in batches in the Trip Reports section here. The week before last, I reached the point in the travelog where I actually got to the NEWT location in Austria.
Last year there was a thread here where we discussed the topic of pictures stolen from Internet sites, usually to be used on people's blogs or on sites like Tumblr, and I made my opinions (negative!) pretty clear there. Our host Stuart made his own contribution to that conversation, and he agreed with me.
http://freerangenaturism.com/forum/index.php?topic=5.15So, I posted my first set of pictures from NEWT, and as I did so, it occurred to me that now I was with a mixed group of men and women, my pictures might become more tempting to thieves, because they're basically voyeurs most of the time, primarily interested in pictures of women. So, I added a note about claiming copyright, even though it's not legally necessary (what's yours is yours, and you don't have to tell anyone so). I thought at the time, "Yes, that'll stop them", but at least I did something!
I thought that if (when) my pictures were stolen, they'd end up in some string of Tumblr sites that I'd never hear about, and I wouldn't mind much. What I hadn't expected was that a member here would steal from me for the benefit of his own pathetic blog! But that's what happened, in less than a week. The individual involved was KENSUNWALKER. As is entirely typical, he selected a picture that recognizably had a woman in it, and he gave zero credit to me as photographer, and didn't identify the location or occasion. He also added a title right in the picture, "Freehiking Europe"--to discourage theft, maybe! As far as the lack of information is concerned, that's the way the process has to work, because a thief can't say very much about his merchandise, and certainly won't identify his victim. I posted a fairly caustic response to the picture, and Ken did remove it.
As I said, it's been a week since this occurred and I still don't know what it's reasonable to think about it. My first action was to remove any other pictures that would be tempting to thieves, and in future I'll be selecting pictures to be all male when people are clearly shown. I think this will protect both my friends and myself, because I expect those are the only ones thieves would take, but of course I recognize that with a few days to do their work, Ken and others like him had ample chance to take what they want from the first set. I said in the title that this has been a discouraging experience, and it's put me off sharing photographs on the Internet. But it's probably effective just to say that I'll avoid most pictures of women, and it doesn't distort the overall atmosphere too much, because we guys are usually a pretty large majority anyway (and is that related to the demand for pictures of naked women, one wonders?)
I'd really like to hear what Ken thinks about this incident and how he would explain his policy on obtaining material for his blog. As far as I can tell, it's "I'll take whatever I want from wherever I find it, and I don't care what the owner thinks about it", but maybe he has some other way of describing it. In the message where I asked him to remove the stolen item from his blog, I made sure to include my email address, thinking he might care to apologize, but no such luck. Well, there's the story.
