Friday, March 23, 2007

A Public Apology to Kevin Lightner

Well, interesting times. If any of you have visited my Flickr sets, you will have probably noticed a couple of sets, "Synth Stuff" and "Other People's Modulars".

These sets have (had) all sorts of tasty photos of wonderful synths that I've found around the web.

Many of these pictures came from Kevin's Synthfool website. Kevin is a highly regarded tech and has worked on many famous systems, and I believe he photographs them all.

Both of these Flickr sets had a description that includes "some of these photos are mine, and some were found on the web". Additionally, every single photo that came from Synthfool was labelled "Photo from Synthfool" in the photo's description section.

Nonetheless, it seems that Kevin took enormous offense at my inclusion of his photographs. I won't get into the details, however I can tell you that I'm certain that he was very, very upset indeed. Surprisingly so.

Also, there's something that I screwed up on, which certainly compounded his offense - in Flickr you can set copyright and permissions on your photos. I have over 3000 of my own photos (and, untill recently, a few dozen of other people's), so I have a default setting of 'all rights reserved'. (just can't manually do every single one)

Flickr has many, many wonderful options. I cannot claim to know every one of them in intimate detail. When I originally set the global 'all rights reserved' option, I did not consider that later I would add photos that I found on the web (disclaimer on the photo or otherwise). I screwed that up, and I apologize to Kevin, and to anyone else who has seen my photos or read my blog, and feels that I have been dishonest or misrepresented any one else's work as my own.

I did not at any point intend to suggest that they were 'my photos', or represent them as such. I apologize wholeheartedly and honestly, and hope none of this has caused you any damage.

You guys won't be able to find any of those photos in my Flickr sets anymore, nor in the future if I come across any others. I'm sorry. I will also try to be very careful about what images I use when posting at this blog.

Oh, I don't have sex with dogs either. For the record.

-----------------

Edit on March 18, 2008 - I've locked this post from comments, and 'hidden' the comments that have been made. Every couple of weeks I feel like doing this, as every couple of weeks 'anonymous' user(s) toss up a bunch of comments simply slagging Kevin off. I've put up with it awhile, but I'm tired of it.

I've tied my online identity to my posts, I've got no shame in expressing my opinion and letting people know how I feel. The anonymous thing bugs me a bit. One or two anonymous slags is to be somewhat expected, but this long-running habit of putting them up time & time again has gone on long enough. If you want to slag a man off, at least have some pride in your opinion and the decency to let people know who is making the comments. Otherwise it sad, immature, and nothing anyone's gonna take seriously.