O Hai! Leno Attackers Love My Photos – But Don’t Feel a Need to Pay Me For Them! WTF?

So you may have heard there’s this whole State Senate primary in full swing, and the vote’s not even until June 2008, and yet the candidates, Assemblyman Mark Leno, incumbent Sen. Carole Migden, and candidate Joe Alioto Veronese are all running pretty intense campaigns. Whee.

Anyway, while reading Beth Spotswood’s groovy blog, however, I saw a link to an anti-Leno site, called Leno the Lapdog that attacks the Assemblyman’s record and discusses what they view to be as deficiencies in his voting record, etc. Fine. Whatever.

Imagine my surprise when I saw that they decided to use this photo I took and posted on Flickrfor their homepage.

Now, I’m flattered that some well paid political expenditure committee just loved my cell phone camera skillz so much they felt that said image merited use on a professional piece of political communication, there’s just one little problem – they swiped it off of my Flickr account and didn’t bother to ask, much less pay me for my efforts. That’s taking money out of my pocket in my line of work, and it’s not very nice. Kids – just because it’s on Flickr doesn’t mean you can just swipe it for your own purposes!

Doing a WHOIS lookup on the domain finds that they use a domain proxy service to hide who paid for the domain. They don’t have an email address to contact them, either. Now, come on, kids. You clearly have the money to spend on a site, and you have the money to pay someone to do this for you. But you don’t have the $$$$ to pay me for the use of my work? Come on.

Now, I don’t really have a dog in this fight since none of the candidates has hired me to work for them, and they probably weren’t planning to anyway. Whatever. But it is more than a little irritating to see my work being considered good enough for their needs, but not getting paid – when clearly they have the means. If they’d asked, I might have said yes for a small fee or something.

Since they didn’t ask in advance, I’m now asking for more money – let’s make it a nice round number of around $15,000 – to pay me as a “consultant” for the website’s images and whatnots. I’m willing to negotiate in good faith, and I’m sure you folks are, too!

You can email me here and let me know if it’s going to be a certified check OR paid via PayPal. Either way is fine. KTHNXBAI!

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