Benjamin Hourigan

With this blog having been out of action so long, there’s a lot of upgrading to do. I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.5, and to K2 RC6, losing my custom CSS and header image of the Melbourne skyline in the process. Expect to see some of it back soon.

Japan was a bust. The slap-the-country-in-the-face-post can wait until I return to Melbourne in 27 days.

I’m looking forward to clean air, trees, beautiful buildings, great food, jobs that don’t take 14 hours out of every day, and women who speak English.

I also have a new header image featuring the Melbourne skyline (courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons). Until I leave for Montréal, Melbourne is where I’ll be looking for home.

Last night I changed my blog header image. Since I’m thinking of moving to Vancouver, I wanted an image of the skyline. I was planning on using Doug Morgan’s wonderful Twilight Over False Creek, which I’d recently seen on the Wikipedia article for Vancouver.

When I went to check on the license for it, though, I found the image had disappeared. A little googling found “Doug Morgan’s” page on Pbase, but it also found text like “All images property of Douglas Morgan”, and “Do not use without permission.”

I could have emailed Doug, but it was getting close to bedtime and I wanted a new image up to go with the day’s post, “In Search of Home”. So I went with a vastly inferior skyline image, still available at Wikipedia, and available for use under a Creative Commons license.

Now, Doug really might not want people using his images for blog headers, and that’s up to him. But, he might not mind, either; and if so, he just missed an opportunity for (a very small amount of) exposure. I don’t have my blog available for use under a Creative Commons license, so I can’t claim any moral high ground, but I have thought, in the past, about using the licences, and I will continue to in future. This is just a case that shows how choosing to use a Creative Commons license can result in your work getting publicity, and someone else’s losing out.