Thursday, 25 November 2010


So I got a comment on my flickr account asking to use one of my photos for a St Andrew's edition of a food magazine (website thing, that is). Cool, I think. How flattering. So of course I say yes - they can use the picture with the proper credit, and I thank them for asking. Because it's always nice when people ask before using your things, especially on the internet when some people are under the impression that the whole thing is 'public domain'.

I don't expect payment for it - I used to work for a local newspaper so I know how difficult it is to produce these things and make a living from it, but they offered to put my name on it and want to send me a wee something as a show of appreciation. A wee something's really not necessary (and I'm a little leery of giving out my address to random people on the internet, to be honest, even nice people who work for magazines), but it's a nice gesture.

But I did wonder how they found the photo, so I did an image search and sure enough, it's the first result for 'brodick bannocks' on Google, so that makes sense. It's also the second result on the image search. Except that photo isn't linking to my flickr account, or my website where I use the photo. No, it's linking to someone's blog. How rude, I thought, nicking my photo like that without asking. So I take a look. And find that they've ripped a whole load of pages of recipes, including the photos, from my website. And my article on Samhainn.

See: The Blog - Recipes
See: My website - one, two, three, four, aaaaand five
See: The Blog - Samhainn
See: My Samhainn article

Oh, and the blog author's ripped a picture of the turnips I carved a few years ago to make an icon to link to another website, plus a few more for image links, and they've reposted the Samhainn article again. Without any attribution.

Now that's just really rude. And ironic, considering the fact that they have a little icon saying 'Blog with Integrity' on their side bar.

I've left comments asking for the articles to be removed, but whether that does anything I don't know. The comments are being screened, so people won't see it even if the blog owner ignores it. I wouldn't be so annoyed if they'd at least given some credit, and asked first.

Plagiarism's bad, y'all.


Seems it was worse than I realised, even. She's also ripped:

Turnip carving
Celebrating Samhainn - Scottish style
Samhainn divination

Compiling screen captures, just in case...