Public Tools and Your Private Stash
If you are an artist or designer or any sort of creative person, there are two really, really, really important things once you’re finished with a project:
- Getting paid.
- Getting credit.
That’s it. I feel like the obviousness of this is implicit, however, I think a friendly reminder is due for myself and others after a little mix-up today.
My good pal Gavin Potenza was fortunate enough to have his work chosen as infographic of the day over on the Fast Company website. Awesome! Only problem? It’s miscredited, because it was found in a Flickr stream of a user whose account is composed solely of other people’s work. (Fast Company’s been alerted of the mis-credit in the comments, hopefully they’ll make the correction quickly.) I don’t think the Flickr user, FSCarballo, is thieving anything, I bet he’s just using Flickr as a place to hold all the inspirational work he comes across on the internet. Fair enough, that seems to be a common use of Flickr by some users.
But, a problem arises from others being able to see his morgue file, which, while holding all kinds of savory occular bits, is a literal dead-end for anyone looking to source authorship. (Or, creates a situation where one would be very likely to cite authorship to the morgue file’s owner, which is what Fast Company more than likely innocently did, seeing as how Flickr is generally used for original work.)
Of course you can say that the Flickr stream was intended to be private. But, it was published. I can link to it. Ergo, not private.
Posting Gavin’s work without proper credit and link is a problem for him because he missed out on having a giant influx of new eyes on his work from an honest mistake. As a creative person, I love it when other people share my work and copy it to their respective places on this web. It’s at testament to how they enjoy it and it’s a sign of connection. Someone wanted to save that thing that I made, and that is incredible. But, it does me no good if it is displayed publicly without credit. With this in mind, I have a few small proposals:
- Keep it public, but give credit. This is totally a no-brainer, right? But think about it this way: even if you have something you consider to be just for you, if someone else can access it or see it, you need to give credit. Much like the case above, you’d be surprised who finds your secret stash.
- Keep it private. — Consider using a tool to keep your morgue file private. My suggestion? Using Little Snapper and putting its library in your Dropbox so it syncs across all of your computers. Or maybe even password protecting your Tumblr blog.
So, please give credit. It’s the only currency for the folks who publish their work online freely.
EDIT: Fast Company has updated the credit. Hoorah!
