Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

In a recent brief news story about the resignation of Austin HS teacher Tamara Hoover I included a 200px wide thumbnail of Ms. Hoover taken and rescaled from her partner Celesta Danger’s flickr stream. Today, I’ve received the following emails from her:

[1] i take the unauthorized use of another’s intellectual property right very seriously. since, you did not ask permission nor recieve it to use my image, you need to remove it so that further action is not necessary.

[2] to all images of tamara hoover on your blog. thats infringement, since the intellectual property is mine and use of that property is unauthorized. please take them down so that further action is not necessary.

[3] you do not have authorization to swipe images of mine and re-post them where you see fit. my images do not fall into fair use guidelines b/c the public does not benefit from you posting my image next to you blog. if fairuse applied in this case, people like cnn.com would have used an image. take image down, do not use my images without permission again. if you want people to see them , then set up a link to my website.

Rather than continue this, I decided to point her to Chilling Effects’ FAQ on “fair use.” The section of interest begins, “The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently held in Kelly v. Arriba Soft that displaying the copyrighed images of another as thumbnails on a search engine was a fair use because the thumbnails served a completely different purpose than the original images.” I also removed the image hosted on my server from the post, and simply hotlinked it to Flickr’s thumbnail, thus absolving me of responsibility.

My question to you–is the image as it appears in that post fair use or not? I derive no financial benefit from including that particular image, and I am not disrupting her business as a photographer and artist, because I simply use the post to direct readers to her Flickr stream and other external resources.

I was happily riding the NYC MTA transit today home from work. I got on the N train to Queens Astoria/Ditmars at 49th and 7th, planning to get off the subway at the end of the line and continue on home. Unfortunately for me, I was mugged/pick-pocketed on the way back!

It happened just after I got down the platform stairs to the street level. It was raining heavily, and I walked north on the sidewalk briskly. After I’d gone about halfway to the next street, I noticed my corporate ID was missing from the clear hanger clipped to my pocket, so I frantically retraced my steps. I asked the MTA cleaners, the MTA guide, and searched the platform itself, to no avail. Finally, I was walking back up the street to go home when I saw my ID cards on the ground. It seems the pickpocketer was only interested in MTA metro pass with about $20 on it.

I didn’t get a good look at the people standing there so I have nothing to go on. There were two older, homeless or poor looking black men standing at that spot earlier, but I wasn’t paying attention and don’t remember their faces.

In one way, it’s good I didn’t lose my corporate ID. Getting new ones would be quite difficult and time consuming, and professionally embarrassing. On the other hand, who can help getting mugged? It’s not like I asked for it.

Farecast now runs to over 55 different cities, and is no longer in private beta. They’ve also added a literal host of new features, including the following liberal trip planner:

You can input a number of cities, and within those five destination cities, your departure city, and a 30-day window, Farecast will find the cheapest place to visit. I can see this being useful for vacationing on the cheap!