User blog:Devilmanozzy/Theft of images...

''This is a repost of what I posted at Ghostbusters Wiki. The Blog over there "of images... the internet is a large containment unit...."''.



At Ghostbusters Wiki, we have over the last two months been cleaning house of stolen images from sites such as GBFans, Proton Charger, Spook Central, and etc. But what about others stealing from us...

The grand large internet is full of images that can be found via search engines such as google and bing, but what about ours? Well Wikia has always had a policy of allowing google/other search engines to use images housed on their network like ours. So searching on google for anything Ghostbusters related, we usually show up within the first 12 images or so depending on what you search for. "But I see images from our wiki on other pages" ..... yes you do, and that gets to the heart of a new issue to talk about.

Theft and/or use without credit of owners. Currently we're the main Ghostbusters related site that provides images on search results (GBFans images usually don't show up, nor do most ghostbuster sites). The good news is people do come to our site and look at our work... But they take it! It has been disappointing the last few years editing here and seeing this.

Now, you wonder why now I'm addressing this? Well as we clean our wiki, we need to provide both better citations to other site images we still use (merchandise section being the highest offender). If we use citations, we stand to look more credible as a Ghostbusters site. So basically, use less images, reduce size of image and provide a link to where the image came from. All this work I feel will reflect on us making a good Wiki, and will give us accreditation to better deal with our own theft.

But getting back to the problem at hand, we are not going to start watermarking images here, or shrinking them to ungodly small images. We have to just deal with the theft by noting in the Image Policy proper citation and what we as a wiki want from sites that use our wiki's images.

But I wanted to let my fellow editors know of what is going on. I don't plan on attacking these sites or anything, cause in a way we have been doing it too, to a lesser degree as all sites do. We should stay aware of theft tho, and who does it. Maybe even address them. But I for one don't have enough time in my life to fight those sort of mindless battles.

By the way, here is what Paul Rudoff wrote on his Help page on Spook Central about this subject:

"Q: Can I use some of your pictures, audio, etc. on my site?"

"A: You may take ten pictures of your choice (excluding personal photos and pictures expressly given to me by others for this site only), upload them to your site, and use them in any way you wish. Edit them, create a collage, use them in a layout: I don't care. However, only if you put a link saying where you found them (i.e. This picture is from Spook Central and is used with permission) can you do this. In regards to the pictures that you take, I do kindly ask that you don't take all or most of the pictures from one particular section. Take a couple and say that more can be found on Spook Central. By the way, notice that I only mentioned pictures. Audio, video, text, and other files are for this site only. Thanks for respecting my wishes. (I don't e-mail pics, so if you can't figure out a way to download the ones on this site, then I can't help you.)" - Paul Rudoff

By the way, we have in fact done this in one place already: Ghost Sniffer/Animated. Note, I'm going to have to in the near future add field area in info boxes for image citations.

We should try not to use too many images from other sites. If we can get it ourselves, just get it from actual screen capping from source.