James Norwood Pratt has nothing on GeekGirl

[Wesli]

Do not trouble thineselves my fellow tea friends!

Drink tea and be happy!

Life must be happy!!!!!!

[Geekgirl]

seems quite a few images on that site (lifted from flickr) are "all rights reserved." I'm pretty sure putting a tiny linkback on the bottom of the post doesn't cut it.

[MarshalN]

James Norwood Pratt does not post himself -- he has given T-ching the right to put up snippets from his previous writing under his name. He knows nothing about what pictures they use. That said, Pratt's version of history is pretty suspect in a lot of places, but that's a different matter.

I have never liked T-Ching, and this just gives me one more reason not to like them. Yet another one of those "bait you with a nice blog and then spring a shop on you" kinda site.

[chamekke]

I posted a third comment, which was along the lines of:

I know the owner of these photographs personally, and she most certainly was NOT asked.

Image theft is disgraceful. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

I'll bet my comment stays in "eternal moderation" too, but I think it's important to let these guys know that they are getting some serious scrutiny.

[Geekgirl]

I say take it to the public board. Clearly they are neither going to remove the photo, nor post our comments. Suggestions? Clearly we can't just move the whole thread over. Should I just start a new post?

[MarshalN]

Go for it.

Or, we can start a campaign on all tea blogs pointing this out. The fact that they haven't bothered to respond to any of your comments, even privately, is pretty disgusting.

[Geekgirl]

I'm sure the rest of you who posted (moderated) comments has received this. I find it a poor response to the situation, and don't believe for a second that copyrights have been respected. In my searching yesterday, I found a half dozen photos that were from various flickr accounts that were "all rights reserved," and at this point do not believe that t-ching has received permission. After all, they did not respect my limited copyright either. In addition, she would have us believe that this has only happened "once before." I call bullshit.

Now, they have responded, but have NOT responded by removing the image until the matter was resolved. Instead they have basically said "oops, teehee we goofed. So sorry... can we keep it anyways?"

I am not pleased, nor am I placated.

Dear geekgirlunveiled -

I am the publisher of the tching.com online tea education blog and just found out that we have mistakenly used one of your images in our post. I wanted to apologize to you for this improper use. We recently brought on a new, volunteer photo editor who is still learning the ropes and mistakenly took several images from the wrong section of Creative Commons that had copyright restrictions. As you have indicated in your comment, this has happened to us once before where our previous editor naively and mistakenly posted images with copyright restrictions. At that time, we apologized and went back through all of our past images and requested permissions or removed the images. We were certainly distressed by this as it was never our intention to disregard or disrespect anyone by infringing on their copyright restrictions. At the time, and as I'm sure you saw in the current post your photo was associated with, we always provide a link to the photographers page and credits at the bottom or our posts. As such, I would hope that you can see that our intention was never to hide anything. Our intention is always to give credit where credit is due. We very much appreciate all of the photographers out there who do openly and willingly provide these wonderful images for people to use. We would never want to do anything that would be disrespectful of that wonderful open sharing.

I hope that you can forgive us this mistaken indiscretion of the improper use of your image and see that there has never been a pattern of blatant disregard for the rights of the photographers whose images we have gratefully used. We certainly have made our fair share of mistakes as we continue to grow and learn more about living and working in the online environment and I'm sure we will continue to make others. Please let me know if you would be comfortable to grant us permission to use your image or if you would prefer that we remove it from our site. I will look forward to hearing back from you soon and, again, I apologize for this mistaken improper use of your image and hope that it has not caused you any undue distress.

Blessings,
Sandy

[Geekgirl]

In addition, a long response has been posted on the blog (where my image still resides without permission,) in which she attempts to make this the fault of the complainers instead of the thieves:

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of this entire event has been the assumptions that others have made. People seem to assume the worst. Perhaps they have been burned in the past and live their lives expecting others to hurt them again.

Not only that, but she precedes that by attempting to make a case for this portion of the site being non-commercial.

The fact that none of the several comments left were approved for publication, and yet were responded to with this long list of pandering excuses, tells me that they fully intend to do what they want, as long as they can get away with it, with no more than a weak protest.

[Proinsias]

I got this email at the begining of January:

Dear Gary,

I am the copy editor for T Ching. I wrote the post you refer to, "Tea Travels to Tournament."
Thanks for the gorgeous photo. The photo editor and I are new to this. The photo editor did credit
your photo, but when I posted the article to the blog, for some reason the credit for the photo was
lost in transit, and I did not notice.

Please accept my sincere apologies. If you like, I can remove the picture from the post; or, I can
credit your photo properly on the post itself.

Please let me know how you would like me to handle this, and please accept my sincere apologies.

Thanks.

Regena

Doesn't seem that much has changed.

[brandon]

What the heck is this comment on the original post? Besides all the nonsequitor political blather about hope and change for America, efforts are made to say that the blog is purely educational and not a commercial endeavor. Of course, they don't say as much in plain English, or make any mention of their webshop.

They also go to pains to explain that none of the contributors, including the new photo editor, receive a salary. In fact, I clearly remember reading their posting soliciting a new photo editor. It listed the job qualifications and made claims that the candidate would be expected to work "for a time" without any compensation. Prospective editors were strung along with an offer akin to an internship. There are clear plans to fund part to full time contributions to the site. Those without the benefit of a photographic memory and an aggressive attitude might enjoy the original post:
http://www.tching.com/index.php/2008/09 ... t-t-ching/

Dishonesty abounds - tear them to bits.

[Chip]

I say take it to the public board. Clearly they are neither going to remove the photo, nor post our comments. Suggestions? Clearly we can't just move the whole thread over. Should I just start a new post?

Please learn a thing or two about copyrights before stealing any more photos.
The online tea community is a small group and this will certainly be noticed.

The power of the general forum and forwarding a link would have a dramatic impact ... ask Space.

echooooo ...

[Phyll]

Hi,

Not to defend nor to inflame any party, but...

I know Michelle and Sandy personally and I think they are honest, kind people, and sincere in their words. I hope they are putting sincere efforts into addressing the copyright infringement complains, though. There was a time when T Ching only existed as a blog (no online store), and I think the format and procedures for the blog were set back then before the online tea store was launched. But instead of changing the procedures (for the images in particular), maybe they tried to circumvent the copyright issues by arguing that the blog itself remains non-commercial...only the store is. I'm not a copyright expert, so I have no comment on whether that's legal or moral or not.

By the way, I agree with MarshalN that T Ching blog somewhat acts like "bait you with a nice blog and then spring a shop on you" site. And this is in the same way that TeaChat, TeaMuse, etc. are, too, for Adagio Tea, I think. I don't see anything wrong with that since store blogs have become the trend nowadays and they've been proven to help the business.

My 2 cents.

Phyll

[Geekgirl]

Whether they are nice or sincere is completely irrelevant. This issue has come up before, and it is still coming up. They need to straighten it out. It's still stealing, even if the thief is "nice."

[Space Samurai]

Both Michelle and Sandy have emailed me about my comments, and I have told them both the same thing. They don't seem to understand that they are still using stolen property. They can say whatever they want to, but as long as the pictures remain up, the issue has not been adressed.

[Chip]

Has anyone sent them a link?