Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

I was deeply troubled by comments made in a Flickr forum that I admin by Photographer James Rhodes. His Flickr account is here where he goes by thevikingjames. He’s on Facebook here. For some reason Rhodes seems to blame me for internet harassment that he feels he’s suffered on the internet for admining an uncensored group on Flickr. He claims to have stalked me at the Dream Machines Show this past year in Half Moon Bay and has written that I didn’t know how close I came to being mugged by him at that event.

Note. This is someone that I’ve never met in life and had no signficant interaction with on the internet prior to him making these sorts of threats. He’s made threats against other people in this internet forum as well. I’m not going to get into the details of this specifically, other than to say that I found it offensive that he’d suggest that he was stalking me at a public photographer event. And that he’d threaten physical violence against people over differences in photography in an internet forum. I’ve posted a few posts of his below so that for the record (and Google) they can be associated with his name.

I did give James an opportunity to try and de-escalate this situation prior to blogging about his behavior on the internet. When somebody threatens people physically however that is totally inappropriate. When somebody claims to have stalked me and almost mugged me I take it personally. Whatever qualms James may have about an internet forum, threatening violence is not the answer. Below are the quotes attributed to him. I’m happy to give him ample space in this same blog post to justify his position or provide a response to why he felt it necessary to use these words.

“Must be the Sicilian in me, just can’t let things go…. still have yet to pay a visit to EA, and TH doesn’t know how close he came at the dream machines event at that airport on the coast…. and TH never really did anything… I just wanted to make an example of him… good thing I realized that he never said or did anything… I would have felt horrible afterwords….”

well to be clear I never threatened you, I just watched you from a distance. You never knew I was there, and you would have never know why someone would have “mugged” you in the parking lot…..it would have all been a strange coincidence…

Here’s another threat he made against another member of the same forum:

“I’m with you Hyp. just begging for this piece of shit to dig his hole deeper. Fuck in South Africa, I bet I could hire someone to do whatever I want to his family for less than $5k US. Its amazing what can happen if you have enough money, I don’t even have to see or meet the people who do it. That will be pretty hard to prosecute….”

Yea you never claimed to be anything, because thats exactly right , you are nothing, and never will be for that matter. You hate on people who live the life you wish you had but can never afford. You are honestly the most pathetic person I have ever met, and I have met alot. The simple fact of the matter is you don’t know what I am capable of, and you think you are safe and secure in South Africa, but believe me one day you will see my face. I know where you work, and I don’t think it would be to hard to find out where you live, and who lives with you. Don’t think I’m above bringing this to your loved ones, I will make you regret every fucking word you write, with interest.

I’ve been threatened with violence on the internet in the past and it’s not very much fun. I find it deplorable when people seem so willing to suggest violence and very personal when it’s directed at me. Hopefully people who engage with James in the future will have the benefit of reading his words here themselves to gain insight into his character.

I really truly honestly wish I did not feel the need to blog this post right now. But I’m very upset over the threats of violence suggested by James.

Update: More from James: “Well Tommy, I am “warning” you that you are a over-bloated douchebag ego maniac, and the next time I see you, wether it be late at night, walking to your car, in public on one of your photowalks, or even outside your house. I’m warning you that you are going to need a good set of dentures when I’m done with you.”

If you piss me off I will bring reality to your doorstep, see its what men used to do before we had web anonymity to hide behind. You say shit about me I feed you my fist, very simple….

Update #2: Although I don’t normally censor comments on my site, I just chose to delete some comments on both my blog and Flickr photostreams where James was referencing my daughters by name who are 5 and 6 years old. In one reference he talked about looking up my 5 year old daughter’s dress. While James may be the type of person that is full of hatred, I find it deplorable that he would extend his threats of violence towards me by referencing my children by name in posts about them, innocent parties and young children to make it worse. Further, the perverted remark he made about looking up my daughter’s dress paints the picture of a truly troubled individual who would choose to sexualize someone’s child as a way of spewing hatred out against them.

Usain Bolt Image by Richard Giles, used under a Creative Commons license.

Earlier this week I blogged about a threatening cease and desist letter that Australian photographer Richard Giles received from the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The letter had objected to Giles’ “distribution and licensing” of Olympic photos in his Flickrstream.

Among other things, the IOC noted that “any reproduction and distribution of images of the Olympic Games and IOC identifications by any means, including over the World Wide Web, without the consent of the IOC is unauthorized.” They further claimed ownership over the Olympic rings and actually over the word “Olympics,” itself. Perhaps most offensive to me personally, the IOC had written in their heavy handed letter to Giles that any images of the Olympic Games actually “belonged” to the IOC.

The letter was signed by Howard M. Strupp, the IOC’s Director of Legal Affairs and suggested that Giles needed to conform with their requests (which were a bit vague) by October 8th. Rather than remove or relicense his images on Flickr, Giles instead posted his letter to his Flickrstream. It was first picked up by Duncan Riley over at the Inquisitr. I blogged about it. Boing Boing picked it up. TechDirt blogged about it. It started going viral. Giles also got in contact with both Electronic Frontiers Australia and Creative Commons Australia to try and figure out what his best course of action might be.

From the tone of the original heavy handed letter, it initially sounded like the IOC was actually objecting to Olympic imagery appearing on Flickr at all, having cited the images as unauthorized and saying that the images belonged to them (contrary to U.S. copyright law at least).

The IOC after receiving a bit of heat from the web though quickly back pedaled and clarified that their position was not that they wanted Giles to remove his photos from Flickr, but rather they wanted him to relicense his image from Creative Commons to all rights reserved.

After writing in to the IOC I was contacted myself by Mark Adams at the IOC who clarified that position and Giles was also contacted by the IOC with this information as well. To their credit, I found Adams very professional in his email correspondence with me. Adams told me that the the main objection that they had was that Giles’ image had been used for a major commercial book promotion in London. On his blog Giles confirmed that his image had been used (without any compensation to him) as an advertisement at a book store in London in conjunction with the launch of the 2010 Guiness Book of World Records.

Giles has a much more detailed post describing most of the above and much more information about his case here.

As of tonight, the issue is still not entirely resolved. Although the IOC seems much more diplomatic at this point than they did in the harsh C&D letter that they originally sent Giles, they still seem to be insisting that he change the license on his photos to all rights reserved.

Giles, on the other hand, would like to retain a Creative Commons non-commercial license on his photos. All of his Olympic photos are licensed CC non-commercial as it stands now, with the exception of the Usain Bolt photo (the same photo used by the bookstore in London) that is licensed just regular CC. Giles had removed the non-commercial restriction on this license originally at the bequest of wikipedia so that they could include the image on their site.

To me Giles’ position to retain his CC non-commercial license on his images makes perfect sense. I think he should not cave in to the IOC and change his Olympic photos to “all rights reserved.” The Creative Commons non-commercial license is perfectly suitable to protect the IOC against unauthorized commercial use as the non-commercial portion of CC would prohibit this. If the IOC is going to insist on Giles making this change, this move would worry me for a number of reasons.

First, the CC license (despite the fact that Flickr allows you to change back to all rights reserved) technically cannot be revoked. it is an irrevocable license. From Creative Commons:

“Creative Commons licenses are non-revocable. This means that you cannot stop someone, who has obtained your work under a Creative Commons license, from using the work according to that license. You can stop distributing your work under a Creative Commons license at any time you wish; but this will not withdraw any copies of your work that already exist under a Creative Commons license from circulation, be they verbatim copies, copies included in collective works and/or adaptations of your work.”

Further, it seems like an uphill battle to me for the IOC to go after this popular license. At present there are almost 140,000 images licensed as CC images on Flickr for the search term “Olympics.” While admittedly, many of these images are not of the Olympic games, when you restrict a CC search to “Olympics” and “China” you still get almost 20,000 CC images. Many of them of very high caliber, professional type images of the games.

Even if the IOC gets Giles to relicense his photos, this does nothing to stop other people from using these other images. Unless the IOC is prepared to play a lengthy game of whack-a-mole, this problem is only going to reappear again and again.

Especially in light of the fact that social media is more popular than ever, future Olympic Games will only mean a far greater number of CC Olympic Images make their way online. And we haven’t even gotten into all of the CC Olympic images available at other places like wikipedia — for example, this image of sprinter Michael Johnson from the 2000 games in Sydney.

Rather than try and fight the CC license, the IOC should take a deep breath, relax and learn to accept it. The liberal nature of the CC license means that images of the games receive even greater distribution. This is the best free PR that money can’t buy.

Trying to stomp out every single photographer with a CC license will only backfire against the IOC. Can they hunker down and take an RIAA approach to images of the games? Sure they can. But if they do, they ought to expect the same sort of hatred that is shelled out to the RIAA when they go about threatening photographers the way the RIAA threatens grandmothers.

Might the IOC miss out on a few dollars here and there because some publisher chooses to go with a free CC image rather than try and license one from them? Sure. But it’s a small price to pay to ensure the goodwill of photographers and fans all over the planet.

The Olympics belong to all of us — to the fans, to the athletes, to every person on the planet, and yes, this even includes photographers like Richard Giles. I think the IOC has taken a good first step to try and diffuse this messy PR case that they’ve made for themselves. They should take the next logical step and tell Richard Giles that they’ve rethought his situation and are willing to accept a CC non-commercial license.

Stanford Theater, downtown Palo Alto

I’m looking forward to shooting and hanging out with a bunch of great photographers next Friday night in downtown Palo Alto. My Pal Trevor Carpenter, who does the great site photowalking.org, is organizing the walk which will start at 6:30pm in downtown Palo Alto. We’ll probably shoot the area there for a while and then end up at a watering hole or what not somewhere later to hang out and geek out about all things photography.

Bring your DSLR, your point and shoot, your Hasselblad, your Holga, your iPhone, or whatever you like to take photos with these days and come on out and join us. It should be a great time for all. This event is open to everyone regardless of skill level, etc. More details from Trevor here.

You can RSVP for the event at upcoming.org here. See you there!

My Palo Alto set on Flickr here.

Adobe Systems today announced their free Photoshop IPhone App. The app is available free of charge at the iPhone store and allows users the ability to edit and add simple effects on photos with their iPhone.

“As the digital imaging leader, Adobe is excited to bring Photoshop.com Mobile to iPhone users,” said Doug Mack, vice president and general manager of Consumer and Hosted Solutions at Adobe. “Now, with access to powerful editing and sharing tools, iPhone users are armed with the resources to document all of life’s unexpected moments, make them look their best and then re-live those memories with friends and family.”

I played around with the app a little bit this morning and have to say that I think it’s very cool — especially for a free app. The app allows you to do some of the most basic edits with your iPhone photos including cropping, adjusting exposure and contrast, converting an image to black and white, rotating an image etc. It also has a very basic set of effects that you can apply and filters that you can add to create effects (like an image border, sketching or blurring effects, and the effect that I liked the most, an effect called “warm vintage”).

I especially liked the cropping tool of the app and found it reasonably robust (for a free mobile app) allowing you to do things like constrain crops to certain aspect ratios (a square crop for example).

You can also use the app to offload your iPhone photos to a free photoshop.com (2GB storage limit) account freeing up storage space on your iPhone. You can also easily access your photoshop.com account via the app to share show people photos from that account via the app later.

The app also allows you to email people albums of photos vs. just sending a single photo with Apple’s own email this photo feature. This feature seems helpful to me as well.

I’m not sure that this product is as comprehensive in terms of cool artistic effects as Chase Jarvis’ new iPhone app (although I still haven’t tried that app which costs $2.99 yet) but for a free app I was pretty damn impressed with Adobe’s initial iPhone product and the price is definitely right. I suspect that Adobe continues to improve it over time as well.

You can find out more info about the app here. If you have an iPhone, just go to app store and search for Photoshop and the app should pull up as a free download.

Note: An update on this story here.

I was disappointed to hear from Duncan Riley over at the Inquisitr that it looks like the International Olympics Committee is playing hardball with people over photos of the Olympics on Flickr.

Duncan points us to the letter at left sent from the IOC’s Director of Legal Affairs, Howard M. Strupp, to photographer Richard Giles. The letter is a legal threat against Giles for hosting images of the Olympics on his Flickrstream in what the IOC feels is a violation of the terms and conditions of his ticket. You can read a large size version of the BS letter that the IOC sent to Giles here.

This really sucks.

The International Olympic Committee is being terribly proprietary with images of their events here and I hope this cease and desist letter backfires on them. I’m equally concerned that the IOC would consider use on Flickr as something other than private use. Flickr is a non-commercial website (by the definition of the terms and conditions of the site, unless approval is received from Flickr for commercial use) and a place for people to share photos with their family, friends and yes the world. That the IOC would go after non-commercial use is disturbing.

What’s even worse, it appears that the IOC is trying to argue with Giles that even using the *word* Olympics in his photostream is somehow some sort of violation.

I hope that the EFF or some other organization can come to the aid of Giles and I hope that he doesn’t end up backing down against the lawyers at the IOC. I’m not sure whoever initiated this action at the IOC but they should probably be fired. Flickr (as well as other online publications) represent a wonderful place for the IOC to generate free publicity over their games. The Olympics really belong to all of us. They are typically associated with goodwill from all nations over the world. To taint this image by being hostile with photographers is just stupid.

Personally as a photographer, learning of this news will ensure that I never attend the Olympics myself. Why would I want to go to an event where they use their money grubbing attack dog lawyers after the event to attack you for sharing positive images of your experience non-commercially with others. The IOC should issue an apology to Giles and tell him that he can leave his photos up and publicly state that non-commercial use of Olympic photography is both allowed and encouraged.

Thanks Duncan for the heads up.

I was pleased today to learn that Starbuck’s has joined Flickr. I’ve been a big Starbucks fan for a while and have personally consumed thousands of their beverages over the years. It is great to see them join Flickr where they can participate in social media with photographers.

One of the first threads in their new Starbucks group was one questioning their photo policy. I’ve been told not to take photos inside Starbucks several times so I was very interested in this. It turns out that Starbucks has no prohibition on amateur photography in their stores. It was nice to see this clarified today.

I also presented an idea to them that I’ve had for a series of portraits of Starbuck baristas. I’m not sure if they are interested in collaborating on this project with me or not, but I’d love to pursue it formally with them. I think I could do a really cool series of 100 portraits or so of baristas. For the past year or so I’ve been trying to get out on the road about once a month or once every other month to spend intense days shooting new towns and cities. So far this year I’ve been able to visit Chicago, Los Angeles, Reno, Las Vegas, Eureka, Redding, Sacramento and several other towns.

As I do my out of town shoots Starbucks has become incredibly instrumental for me. I almost think of them as sort of a homebase for my shoots out in the field away from home. I was posting why I’m such a fan of Starbucks as a photographer in a group on Flickr and I thought I’d post it here on my blog as well.

I thought I’d do it in the form of a top 10 list. The top 10 reasons why as a photographer I’m a fan of Starbucks.

1. I’m addicted to caffeine and they deliver a powerful punch. I saw an analysis on their coffee a ways back that indicated that they had higher caffeine levels than competitors.

10. Getting all of the above for the price of $3.25 or so for a grande non-fat latte is a *huge* bargain. Starbucks delivers tremendous value and they do it with consistency that I can count on vs. other coffee houses where I might not get the same experience.

I’ve only just started my Starbuck’s set, but if you’d like to see (I’m sure it will be growing over time) it’s here.

Note, I was not paid in any way for this post, I’m just a fan.

I’ve been regularly reviewing my Flickr photos using the Flickr organizer to see which of my photos Flickr has been hiding on their site. If you are not aware of how to do this yourself: 1. Go to the Flickr Organizer. 2. Click under the “more options” button under search. 3. And then restrict your flickr images to either “moderate” or “restricted.” Has Flickr censored any of your images?

This will show you images from your photostream that Flickr has hidden or buried from public site areas. These images don’t come up in the vast majority of searches people do on the site. They can’t be used for galleries. They won’t show up under the default view used by most users on the site etc.

I blogged yesterday about James Doiron having his entire 25,000+ photostream restricted over photos of mannequins that show nipples — something Victoria’s Secret has been doing publicly at over 1,000 stores in public malls and other sites across United States for the past several years.

But increasingly Flickr has gone about burying images of art and culture, attacking images from museums of paintings and sculpture with an alarming rate. I had to fight last year with Flickr Staff in the Help Forum (where I’m now banned permanently) because they tried to censor one of my images of a public sculpture that has sat in the middle of Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills now for several years. Public art. Censored. They reversed their decision on that one and lifted the restriction, but not without a lot of work on my part.

Most recently they have censored the artwork above from my stream. The image above is one of a famous painting that hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. It’s entitled Odalisque with Tambourine and was originally painted by Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. They didn’t tell me it was censored. As they mostly do Flickr likes to censor things behind your back, without you knowing.

Ask yourself this — do you find this painting obscene? There are no warnings regarding it’s placement in the museums all ages gallery. And why is it not ok to show the backside of painting of a woman in a museum, but it seems perfectly fine for people to show full frontal nudity of the famous statue of Michelangelo’s David? isn’t it a double standard for Flickr to say that great art of females ought to be treated differently than great art of males.

The basic problem is that the Censorship Division at Flickr is unchecked. They’ve been given unlimited power over who sees our images and who does not. Flickr relevancy to our culture is too important not to resist these intrusions. Censoring great works of art is an insult to all photographers and artists. Like the Victorians of yesteryear who ruined many sculptures by plastering fig leafs over their private parts, Flickr wields the censors sword flippantly and seemingly without consequence. This is bad for morale, bad for Flickr/Yahoo’s PR, bad for Yahoo shareholders and causes Flickr to lose both revenue and important users and contributors who have great things to offer the world.

Yahoo Management ought to seriously consider cutting staff within Flickr’s Censorship Division. Not only would they be saving valuable money from salaries and benefits that could be used for more important things like engineering, they would be doing a better job as stewards of the important and significant cultural jewel that they have on their hands.