About My Photo Copyrights

I've had the experience of hiring an advertising firm to put the finishing polish on some of my highly tweaked text, and then put that text on top of a highly-recognizable background for a full-page local newspaper ad, and the product they came to sell back to me was only my own email laid out on top of one of my own photos from this website. And the number of zeroes they put on that invoice showed they were very aggressively proud of the work they hardly did in the three weeks they took to hardly do it. It left a bad taste in my mouth and I think I hurt their feelings (do reptiles have feelings?)

I've also had a land developer in my neighborhood tell me he paid $125,000 to a PR firm in California to put together all the advertising materials he needed to sell an 18-hole golf course and a couple thousand homesites around it. At least half of the materials they sold him was printed directly from this website (they did take out most of my logos, but not all, and they also left in quite a few of my button arrays so it was blatantly obvious). Do I take that as a compliment, or just another case of use-and-abuse for someone else's profit? Is it really that hard to be an honest human being? Access to the Internet is not really a license to steal, is it?

Anyway, most folks are quite respectful and I really don't mind what they do with my photos (or where they display them), as long as any credit I have written into the photo or image stays written into the photo or image. It's these self-proclaimed "professionals" I have a problem with... and, oh yeah, I have a big problem with the fraudsters perpetrating the San Luis Valley land scams on ...eBay (it's so hard to get enough of a curse on that name when it leaves my mouth). The 5-and-10 acre parcels scattered all around the San Luis Valley have a beauty of their own, but that beauty is a world away from the heavily-forested high mountain lake areas (usually more than 100 miles away) that these folks want you to think you are bidding on. I know because my weblogs display which photos these folks steal from me, and where they are displaying them: on ...eBay, in the land auctions (I have to stop this, getting that word out of my mouth that time really hurt...) In this case, I can't scream BUYER BEWARE loud enough. And do your research, the price you are agreeing to pay for the land will usually be between 200% and 1,000% of the actual appraised value of the land (of course, you need to consult with an honest appraiser and not one who is owned by or in cahoots with these integrity-challenged clowns, oops, I'm sorry, land-scamming thieves, oops, I did it again, how about "walking, talking clumps of human offal," no?... I thought I was getting close but I'm trying to be polite... well, I think you know what I mean by now, I'm sure they know who I'm talking about.)