In 2000, I visited the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto as part of a photo essay on minor league treasures in major halls of fame for minorleaguenews.com. I took some photos of rare and unique minor league memorabilia, as well as a few shots with the Atlantic City Boardwalk Trophy (the championship chalice I found in 1984 and donated to the Hall). During my visit to the Hall, I took a photograph of the Hall building itself, added it to my camera, did some other sightseeing, and caught a Greyhound back to Albany.
Last year, I found these old photos (they were taken with my Nikon CoolPix 800, that’s how old they were) and put them up on flickr as part of a photo essay of shots taken with that old camera.
A few months ago, I received a very odd e-mail. A company called Schamp.com wanted to use one of my photos (with photo credit) as part of their mappable online program. In other words, if you’re using Schmap to find travel directions or tourist locations, Schamp will also provide a photograph of the items or locations to which you are interested.
I don’t know if they did a flickr search or a google search or whatnot, but apparently Schmap was very interested in adding this photograph of the Hockey Hall of Fame to their software. I gave permission, with the understanding that I would receive photo credit and that if anyone clicked on the photo it would bring them to my flickr site. They agreed.
This morning, I saw that the photograph had been included in their computer network, and was accessible through the Internet, or through an iPhone application. That’s my photo on the upper left in the iPhone application, along with Creative Commons copyright protection.
And the nice thing about Schmap is – they did it the right way. They contacted me, asked my permissions, agreed to my requests for copyright protection. Too many times I’ve had people just “cut-and-paste” my work into their projects, without any sort of acknowledgment or accreditation. In fact, last year I caught two major companies using my old Patroons photographs for their own work, even to the point where my watermarked name at the bottom of one of the photos was blurred out. I contacted them about what they did, and eventually was able to receive checks from them for their copyright infringement.
As I said before, at least Schmap did it the right way. Which is why I was more willing to let them use my old photo for their project.
Chuck The Writer 
Toronto is a nice destination. Thank you.
LikeLike