Flutterby™! : privacy & provenance

Yesterday, Gloria Brame linked to a video of a woman with particularly active pectorals that I think was a booth babe at an auto show, but she saw as an animation job done on some unsuspecting person. It did bring up an interesting question of copyright and the provenance of the images we get.

I'm not particulary a fan of those emails with lots of cool images, or, worse, emailed PowerPoint presentation in which someone has carefully copied all of the pictures of some artist's work off of a web site and embedded them in a single file, on the other hand, I have managed to find some really cool work by some really cool artists when I've managed to chase some of those images backwards. And what of sites like Nick Scipio's Picture of the Day (may contain nudity), where he happily republishes things that people have emailed him, and occasionally one of those things will be discovered by an angry copyright holder?

And then... Then this became more than just a simple case of the provenance of email, because Medley linked to Teen Tests Internet's Lewd Track Record, about a young woman pole vaulter from Southern California whose image has been plastered across assorted sites accompanied by commentary of the:

"...Hubba hubba and other grunting sounds."

level.

And then Violet Blue called out the SF Comical on some of their wacky tech writing, in the same entry pointing out a 14 year old photographer whose self portrait has found its way on to the cover of a porn movie. More on Lara Jade's problems at Flickr and at Deviant Art.

I don't have any answers, but it seems like we're going to need some soon, and if we don't start thinking about how to improve copyright then it's going to be done in ways that we won't like.