Now It’s Open to Everyone
In my undying love for Google products I am trying out a lesser known one called Google Moderator. This little web app is used for generating new ideas and voting on them. We used something like this at work once called Spigit. Actually I think we still do and I imagine we paid more for it.
So next month a date has been set for our next trip. If you aren’t already aware James and I have created a Random Trip travel type thing… let’s call it a game. During our travels we perform a variety of tasks. Last time we came up with them, this time we’d like everyone else to, then vote on the best ones. Please avoid getting us arrested for any felonies with your genius.
Each idea can be performed by both James or Myself and everyone will be able to vote on who did it better; we’re real good about documenting the scenes with photo/video.
Due to not finding a better way to integrate this you’ll just have to use this link to vote and submit new ideas.
Owl City and my 15 Seconds of Pure Fame
People have been asking what happened with my photograph and Owl City. I’ve been fairly tight lipped about the whole thing. Any fame I received from this has come and gone. Now that’s settled and I’m paid I’ll go ahead and give the story as best I can without Owl City or Universal Motown Republic Group, a division of UMG Recordings, Inc. (“Universal”), having any reason to try and sue me.
On January 4th 2010 I received an email from a seemingly random guy on the internet. Apparently this band I had never heard of was using one of my pictures on their web site.
Trevor
to me
i like your picture. i guess owl city does as well…http://www.owlcitymusic.com/gallery.aspx?fid=2576&phid=2547
i hope they paid you a lot for its use.
Trevor
When people ask me if I’ve heard the latest [Insert Band Name Here] song I’m the pretentious prick that has to point out that I don’t listen to the radio and only have my iPod ergo I am totally unaware of new music and you should know this; why did you just waste both our time asking? So true to my ignorance when I received this email I had no clue who Owl City was (#4 in iTunes then) and just assumed they were some crappy Indie band that defaced my photo.
I was at work and didn’t have a lot time to dedicate to this picture problem. I went to the site and found a contact address then shot over an email.
Ben Eubank
to ocmgm
Hello!
I’m usually pretty good about people cruisin’ over to my FlickR page and using my photo for things. Typically I get an email asking first, which helps, especially given that I don’t even allow creative commons license on it. In your case however no one has contacted me and there is an ugly photoshop lens flare and some strange emo guy that someone has felt the need to place over the picture. Not really a fan of this.
Not shown is the attachment showing my ownership of the photo and it’s publication on FlickR which has since been removed.
Leaving work I went home and thought nothing more of it really. When my roommate got in from work I mentioned to him that some [nice] band was using my photo without permission. Well, okay, apparently they’re a little more popular than I thought – interesting.
I don’t know this Trevor character was but later that night I started getting emails coming from my site and internetland telling me much more about the situation. My art work was used in a multitude of places, not just on the website. Most notably it part of the actual CD Artwork. One email I received went as far as giving me LinkedIn pages for some of the people responsible for the CD and the credited artist. It was odd to have all these random strangers come to my aid.
After it finally dawned on me that this might be slightly bigger than I had originally made it out to be I received two more emails. One was from Owl City saying they had purchased the images from an artist named Imran Khan and forwarded my email off to Universal Motown Republic Group to elaborate more and another from some guy who ran a website claiming not to be a big fan of Owl City. Because I wasn’t sure what exactly was going on and I sort of wanted to get paid for my efforts I asked Steve, the notfan, to please not publish anything more than a small blurb and not make any assumptions about what happened (i.e. please don’t say they stole anything until we know more).
Of course he didn’t listen and thus began my fifteen seconds of internet fame. Every one says you should get 15 minutes but I can’t possibly see how I could claim to have achieved more fame than the band itself. Shortly after other sites started copying the article and I got a few more emails from people letting me know that OC was using my work.
The next day I was contacted by guy from the record company asking if I could further prove the ownership of the photo and to please not blog about this on the internet saying “Adam” stole my artwork. Universal man was going to follow up with the artist, using the evidence I gave him, and see what he said when the ownership came into question.
As it turns out the artist said he was just that, an artist, not a photographer and had downloaded my photo from the internet then figured he could use it for commercial purposes. To my understanding he did all the album artwork and that raises an eyebrow but I’m not going to openly speculate on what that could mean any further.
Once actual ownership was established we went back and forth about a month discussing payout numbers ranging from incredibly low to considerably low. Fast forwarding a bit we settled on stupidly low the proper paperwork was ultimately signed and I sold out to The Man.
I’ve been told that I will be credited in future reprints of the album and even given a free copy. I’ll believe that when I see it because that’s one thing I do not have in writing. So neither Owl City or Universal Music purposely used my work, they’ve paid me for my picture and I’m not quite sure what happened to Mr. Kahn. The whole thing has been quite a pain in the ass and I’m rather positive it will not lead to future sales of my photography but I guess it’s fun to say I was part of something once.
Free Stuff
Pretty sure I’ve never heard someone say “Let me give you a little bit of free advice” followed by something that didn’t irritate me. A lot of folks like free things. I saw the “NO WE WILL NOT PAY $3.99 A MONTH TO USE FACEBOOK” group (which by the way was just a rumor) with over one million people in it, so there’s gotta be at least one million that like Facebook to be free. It could be argued that certain free sites, a majority of them, are not free, they’re ad supported. I suppose this is true, if I clicked on those ads.
When advertising becomes overlooked noise or just blocked and ignored forever it generates sites no money. Whoa, did I just blow your mind? I didn’t think so. Why is it expected that everything on the internet be free? What happens if Facebook did start charging because they needed money… you wouldn’t pay? You wouldn’t pay for a service that kept you in touch with your friends, stored photos, videos, helped you network and sell things? Would you go to MySpace? How come you didn’t have an account there previously? oh yeah because it’s horrible. Sorry for a bunch of questions I don’t expect anyone to answer but I really see no reason outside of ad revenue why such a site should be free. If something is enjoyed you should be excited they start charging a very nominal fee so they can improve it and you can enjoy it more.
Where it kills me the most is news. Free news sucks. It’s horrible and the internet is just a giant grounds for plagiarism of crappy article after crappy article. Recently with my Owl City fiasco (still waiting on my check Universal Republic what’s taking so long?) I was emailed by one site who decided to make a post about Owl City using my work because they “are not fans.” After that there was a few days I spent showing people the article about myself on the internet because I like attention. Having never saved the link I would simply type “Ben Eubank Owl City” into google and BAM first result. Then after two or three days I started to notice there was more than one result, there was more than one article. It would all be rather exciting if the entire internet was getting up in arms and going to my defense but they weren’t. They were simply ripping off the original author either completely or mostly and adding a little of their own twist to the text. So desperate to find anything to post to their site and too lazy to actually write it themselves.
I want big media to stick around. I’m positive I don’t want to read poorly written articles/blogs by someone who lived by a major event or analysis of what some unintelligent know-it-all thought about the president’s latest stance on an issue. Of course the main news providers have flaws, namely producing extreme biased reporting at times, but at least they’re usually well written and fact checked. What I mean is you don’t go to CNN and pick out four spelling mistakes and a ton of poor grammar. You’re not questioning whether the Fox News Reporter actually interviewed the person they’ve claimed to. While it might seem a little biased it doesn’t read like a fourteen year old high school student writing a paper trying to prove his/her point. I hope CNN stops giving away news for free and the other big guys follow suit. Sure, some douche bag will ultimately retell everything they’ve read there but like all most other free news it will either suck or be illegally plagiarized from the original author.
Free information gets pretty nasty in the way of product reviews. I don’t really have an answer to how to solve this problem, or any other issue I seem to mostly rant about, but this one gets me the worst. Free reviews on products have so many bad things going for them. They get used by other people as their own review, they’re usually heavily biased towards the product in one way or another, often have never used the product they’re comparing it to or the product itself, full of bad information, and my favorite is bad reviews that get their information from other shitty misinformed rumors/reviews. It kills me when I’m out trying to find information for a piece of software or a new book only to realize half way through some lengthy review that the person probably has never used the product. Maybe a disclaimer on all reviews will help “I have never used this product but I still feel the need to review it for you with no more knowledge than you have.” Amazon must have found this annoying too as they attempt to make things better putting a “Amazon Verified Purchase” next to names of reviewers who they can say bought the product they’re reviewing. Of course that only solves the “I’m reviewing something I’ve never used” problem and not the plethora of others. It would be awesome if “Well just don’t read the reviews if they suck” was a good alternative. Unfortunately in order to know something sucks you generally have to read it to find out.
The US cell phone industry reminds me a lot of free information. Cell providers in America give away free phones, or considerable discounts on them. Due to this subsidy on phones they require people to have contracts, have higher rates than other parts of the world and annoy people. People expect the discounted phone, if you don’t give it to them… they’ll get it somewhere else. If one cell company said “No contract required but you provide the phone” then you go looking for unlocked phone prices only to find they’re $300-$600 you would say “f-u cell company X I’ll just use Y because they have a free phone! BOOYAH BITCHES” then you’d probably complain in about a year and a half how you’re in contract and can’t “upgrade” yet etc, etc, etc. It’s possible you’re not seeing the parallel here I see with free stuff on the net. But it’s like this… if CNN starts charging, you’ll like go read another news site, and another, and another because for whatever reason you don’t feel it’s justified for a site to charge for news. Facebook charges? go to myspace. Everything could be better but we’ve found ourselves in a situation where unless every company worthwhile over night decided to change it would be an incredibly ballsy (and highly unprofitable) thing for anyone to start charging. If AT&T started saying the only way you could get an iPhone was to pay $500 but you wouldn’t need a contract there would be a lot less iPhones and probably a lot less subscribers as they went over to Verizon who saw that as a great opportunity to save money up front.
Not everyone should charge, small media that is worthless should continue to be free or ad driven (by the way I think news and print media sites should charge and have ads). When they are big enough boys to have real journalism/good products and people deem it worthy then charge. What’s the point when you start charging? I don’t know, I guess when you can.
In my perfect world where the internet stops being completely free and good sites begin to charge to support their profit rather than blowing up in some Web 2.0 Adword Bubble later on I can see a few different ways to charge. Monthly subscriptions are an easy win for some sites and are already done today. $3.99 for all you can Facebook or $1.99 and you can’t upload more than 50 pictures a month of you at some bar drinking with your friends. Maybe articles on CNN are $.10 a piece. My life is chaotic at times and I might not want to pay $9.99 a month to a news site that I might visit heavily at one point and never for a month. 10 articles for $1 seems fair, as long as the journalism is there… and I think that’s what I’m paying for. Maybe pay4news will slowly kill the nothing news. When no one is paying to read about Paris Hilton’s Dog’s haircut maybe you won’t post an article to your site about it.
It seems like I should spend more time going over what I’ve written and grammar check or remove all the times I’ve repeated and over used words after having written this. But I’m not making money from my site so I don’t have time nor do I care.