It appears that social network widget service ZingFu (which was just acquired by ProfileBuilder) does not acknowledge Creative Commons licenses when it comes to photography. They took one of my photos of Om Malik and Michael Arrington, cropped out Om and used it for one of their greeting cards to promote TechCrunch 40. In doing so ZingFu violated both the attribution and noncommercial aspects of my Creative Commons license for that photo.
Here’s the ZingFu page that features the greeting card with my photo, which you can either embed or send to people. The page also includes a photo of Guy Kawasaki where the original photographer is not credited.
Here’s my original photo on Flickr. Not only does it have a Creative Commons license associated with it, I even went the extra step updating the description to reference the CC license and list how I want attribution.
I don’t normally write posts like this, but this is becoming such a common occurrence with startups, that I felt that something needed to be said about it. Also, every other day either one of my photos or those of a fellow photographer are being used without attribution, often for commercial purposes.
UPDATE 1: It looks like ZingFu has already removed the image, of course not before I was able to grab a screenshot of it:
TechCrunch also posted a screenshot with their write-up on the ZingFu acquisition by ProfileBuilder.
UPDATE 2: ZingFu Co-Founder Bob Ralian has left an apology in the comments.
