Plagiarized Images
Jane McGary (Tue, 22 Jan 2013 09:49:52 PST)

I agree with Matt Mattus that the benefits of reaching a wide
audience can outweigh the potential loss of income from certain types
of intellectual property.

However, as an editor who has worked with hundreds of authors over
the years and with various publishers, I would also say that the
decision to make text and images readily available for reuse should
be up to the creator. Some writers and photographers (including
myself) don't depend on their work for income and are unconcerned
about its fate once we release it into the public sphere. Those who
want to keep control of their work because it is their source of
income or for some non-economic reason should refrain from putting it
online except in forms that cannot easily be copied and used further.
It is also possible to sell content online, or even to make content
available only by paid subscription, as publishers of journals and
major reference works now do.

I am not a particularly good photographer, but like some other
correspondents here, I've noticed a few of my photos taken from the
wiki and used elsewhere. This doesn't bother me, but we editors are
hardened to going without credit. Plenty of my writing has gone into
print under other people's names. (Did you know I was an expert on
the religious history of Yemen? Or anyway, that I quickly wrote an
encyclopedia entry on it, having been provided with a stack of
research material by a desperate project editor.)

It almost seems that the era of control of intellectual property was
a passing phase in the long history of art and literature.
Unauthorized translation, imitation, and blatant plagiarism were so
common up to two centuries ago that studying the subject has become
its own subdiscipline. I think we just have to make ourselves
comfortable in the new Republic of Letters and Images, or move to a
private island.

Jane McGary
Portland, Oregon, USA