Lesson Learnt

People, how do you protect your pictures? I knew this was going to happen..there was something completely absurd about those hundreds and thousands and lakhs of pictures out there on facebook and the ease with which I could copy anyone's picture onto my harddrive was a bit disturbing and still is.

Incident - album of postcards, not my pictures per se, but that Seriously Awesome series if you remember. Some cow in my class has her status update as her blogpost, so I clicked on it and imagine my surpirse, when there were MY pictures, up there. To be fair, she didn't say she's taken them, it was about how she wants a camera and wants to take pictures like that(would be smug if I wasn't so cheesed off.) Fair enough, but there was absolutey no link back to my page, or creditaion to me and it hit me somehwere in my gut and I went do I even have a right over those pictures anymore? What good is 'owning' them if they'vwe been saved several times over and passed off as other people's own? Ofcourse I called her and told her to take them down ASAP but it's besides the point no?

Let me give my my photo history, as a kid, growing up right through my teenage years I used to absolutely hate, detest, abhor bieng photographed. Maybe I was shy or didn't photograph well or had weight issues or whatever, but most of the snaps are of half my face, my hands covering my face and other such cranky poses. Then round about the time I turned 17 we got a digital camera, and since then, I've been chronicling - family shindigs and the rest, and off late my amateur photography has taken off, in the sense that there are albums and albums or blurry pictures of puddles and birds etc..you get the idea?

Now the thing is, over the past year or so I've been having quite a ball. Just generally, I'm happy wiith who I am and my day to day etc and I think that has a big deal to do with my willingness to pose for snaps now. It really is true the whole, "feel good inside look better on the outside." Even then, it's mostly me taking pictures of everyone else, and I collect them and every couple of months I'll put up an album of say 40 pictures with maybe 2-3 of me.

But now I'm pissed off. It's a primordial thing, to protect oneself, hence I relish the anonymity of the blog. yet, how do I protect the content on this too? On one level, I tell myself not to be so self important, no one's going to borther, but evidently that's doesn't happen not because I'm super interesting but because people are bored and have WAY to much time to spend online, myself included. Pictures DO speak a thousand words, and I've been quietly deleting those albums barring a few.

Am I paranoid? I think not. Becasue I never really took to facebook anyway. It was always a voyeur thing, and only very occassionally a keep-in-touch thing which I'm not that hung over anyway because the people I want to be in touch with I am.

So creative commons I get, but what difference does putting that c on the corner make?The damage would already be done right?