RESOLUTION: See the last comment below and “Theftoptopia Gate is officially over.”
I got an IM today from friend and ex-roomie Alex Shanfeld who said:
alex: a wall paper made by you came up on my super cool background program jawn. gumballs.
me: is your super cool background program randomly grabbing flickr images?
alex: i don’t think so. I’ll find out what its called in a sec.
alex: desktoptopia.
So I go visit this site and find out that for $20 bucks, you can have “Desktoptopia automatically update your monitor with fresh designer desktops … from our ever-growing master collection.” Now, I remember making that desktop. I was on a film shoot in North Philadelphia at a “mom and pop” grocery store, and I decided to snap a macro picture (one of my favorite techniques) of an old gumball machine. I liked the way it came out, but I decided to take it further and tweaked the colors in photoshop and then resized it as a desktop for my 23″ cinema display and Macbook. On Flickr I commented “this can be used as a wallpaper for the macbook (highest resolution).”
C’mon, Eli. Get to the POINT.
Ok, here it is. I’m not concerned with the fact that my photo appeared in a for-pay service’s library without my consent. I’m not concerned that they didn’t even link back to me. What concerns me is that when I googled “desktoptopia eli horne,” I came across “my” member profile page on their site. It says I’ve been a member since the 12th of August, 2007. NOTE: This page has since been altered by the folks at Desktoptopia. Luckily, I snapped a picture first.
A. I’ve never heard of this site before today.
B. I certainly never created an account.
C. I can’t find any text on their site disclosing the fact that they are harvesting flickr for “designer backgrounds.”
Also, the fact that they stole clipart and style cues from Shaun Inman’s Mint stat application doesn’t help their case. I looked around for a credit back to the original author, didn’t find any. And I’m sorry, but from the look of your site, I don’t believe you created them yourself. Screenshot of Mint’s forms, compare to this screenshot of Desktoptopia’s forms.
Copying clipart is a little thing, and we’ve all done it. Sometimes somebody just “gets it right” and it’s hard to improve on their work. When I started making websites, I bit off of other people’s work all the time (I can admit it). But at the end of the day, making it yourself is always better. Just being different, a taste of originality, can make up for the fact that its not “as good” as what the other guy had. Be influenced, be inspired, but don’t “save as” and upload. Please?
That said, apparently I’m ranked 51. Everyone knows that should be higher (joke).
C’mon guys. You have a really cool application idea, but you really have got to be honest if you are selling your software. I’d be more than happy to agree to let you use my photo, and I might even contribute wallpapers to you in the future, but you need to straighten up your act. Fast.
UPDATE: Wow. I really didn’t expect this kind of turn-out for my story. Thank you to everyone for drawing attention to this situation. I don’t usually have a lot of “celebrity moments,” but as a web geek I’m totally going berserk about some of the rockstars who have commented below, and that I’ve been linked to by one of my idols.
Eric pointed out that “now the profile you linked is “Unknown†with no associated backgrounds. It still has the same join date, though.”
Guess its a good thing that I took a screen grab of the profile page then, isn’t it? Can’t really say why I felt the need to. Better safe than sorry?
/update
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