With the exception of airlines and banks, I’m not one for pointing out how degenerate some companies are, but this particular story annoys me. Nerve Media’s behavior is reprehensible, and in my opinion thoroughly immoral (not a term I use lightly or frequently).
My wife reads a blog called Sweet Juniper. It’s written by a husband and wife team and is mostly about being a parent. Some months ago, the authors discovered that Babble (owned by Nerve Media) had taken a photo of their daughter from Flickr and used it without permission. The photo was clearly marked with a copyright notice and "all rights reserved".
Not only did they take the photo without permission, but they used it as the title image on a story about the dangers of lead paint.
The photo shows a toddler with a doll sitting in front of a wall with peeling paint.
I would be annoyed by someone using my pictures without my permission, period. But using the picture as the intro to a scare story with the CLEAR implication that this is a child impacted by lead paint — that would make me angry. And probably litigious.
When the author of the blog (also the father of the toddler in the picture) contacted Babble, they offered $100 to use the photo. When the author refused they did eventually remove the photo. The Editor of the magazine blamed the site’s photo editor, claiming the the editor thought it was under a creative commons license. Any editor that doesn’t know that creative commons licenses exclude commercial use is clearly an idiot.
But it gets better. Several other folks piped up and said that they had the same experience with the same publication. The Editor of Babble then claimed it was all the fault of an intern and made initially positive noises about being concerned. The CEO of Babble then joins the conversation to "justify" the events, crying that they were a "small budget" operation, and at the same time claiming that the $100 they offered was 4x what they would normally pay Getty Images for a photo.
When the author points out the many flaws in the CEO’s argument, the CEO goes on to try and smear him, claiming "Sweet juniper, on the other hand, has a very specific agenda here: he is trying to find a way to make some money off of us."
Unbelievable. And a fantastic way to NOT run a business.
If you care to, you can read all the BS here. But the short summary is that Nerve are clearly a reprehensible organization with no ethics whatsoever.
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