A fellow blogger is going through quite the nightmare right now: not only were the pictures of her children stolen from her blog, but somebody actually impersonated her for a whole year!
This blogger is one I’ve always admired. She is a wonderful writer, a talented photographer, a beautiful person. She is on a mission to show that living in a biracial and bilingual family is normal and beautiful. As a mom who also has a multicultural family, I am more than grateful for her efforts, and she is one of my major influences.
So when I found out what happened, I was shocked to the core. Just because we put our writing and our pictures up to share as part of our story, does not mean that somebody can just take them without asking. If it was a physical object, they wouldn’t even consider taking it without the author’s consent. You wouldn’t take a painting out of the museum claiming that this is a public place and so you can take it home as your own, right?
It’s the same online. If you take a picture without someone’s content, it is THEFT. I can hardly find the right word to describe someone who not only stole pictures of somebody else’s children, but also posed as their mother. What kind of a freak does something like that? It makes me sick.
In real life, we don’t leave small children alone, we tell them not to talk to strangers to make sure that nothing happens to them. But we also want our children to have a careferee childhood, to have a life without worries whether someone will abduct them. We allow them to take some risks. I believe it should be the same on the Internet. When I put a picture of my child online, I don’t want to worry about having them stolen or photoshopped for some sick causes. I just want people to see how cute my children are, that’s all! Everything else would be sick, sick, sick!
This is less about intellectual property and more about the right of parents to choose to put pictures of our children out there and expecting everybody to behave properly. It is about our rights for our children to enjoy the same freedom and safety online as they enjoy offline.
That our pictures and our words are ours should be understood. But when our children get involved, it’s a whole different thing. Because it doesn’t matter if our children are on-or-off line. They’re our children and you’d better keep your hands off them.
2 Comments
This is something on my mind all the time too. I read a post a couple years ago about a mom who posted a picture of her son on instagram. This picture was stolen by a company in brazil and put on T-shirts. She couldn’t do anything to get the T-shirts recalled or sale stopped. Yikes! Then on the other hand you always hear about how fugly watermarks are to the readers. Where is the balance? What will our kids think when they are older, about us posting their pictures and lives on the internet?
I am wondering the same thing, Shawna! The situation you describe is awful!