I'm not partaking in Pinterest.

By Carolyn, on February 28th, 2012

©2010 Carolyn A Pappas, San Miguel de Allende. Watercolor in 5.5 x 8 inch sketchbook.

I had a Pinterest account, and pinned things to it here and there, but I was never a heavy user. I recently decided to delete my account altogether though, as well as add the no pin meta tag to my site and disable pinning on flickr. I have been seeing countless articles online about how bad their TOS is regarding copyright issues and I was disheartened when I read it for myself. I am a great respecter of copyright and don’t want to associate myself with any service that facilitates theft. Although it is an interesting concept for a social media site, I’m not willing to spend time requesting permission from other people to pin their content. While some people are okay with linking to the original source and giving credit, logically this is not enough for me. For now, if I have interesting things to show you, I will just link to them the old fashioned way.

The above image was a practice sketch I made for the October 2010 Virtual Paintout. I never posted it anywhere though, until now.

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Creative Evolution

By Carolyn, on April 20th, 2010

The other day I was looking through the recent activity on my flickr account and I came across a comment on a picture I uploaded ages ago. It was surprising to me really, because it was something I did in my former life (notice I don’t sign my work this way anymore) and I wasn’t really expecting to see it.

Orin Zebest took this image I made of an “imaginary landscape”:

Imaginary Landscape

and used it for the background for this “imaginary postcard”:

description

I really like seeing the creative evolution here. When I originally made this drawing in 2008, I used this photo as an inspiration, then Orin used my drawing to come up with the postcard to use on his (really cool) wedding website.

Most things I read about copyright are negative, such as Google and other corporations in the US and UK lobbying to change legislation to profit from individual artists. Katherine Tyrrell recently wrote about The farce of the Digital Economy Bill, which is a really informative post about the situation in the UK. In general though, I think most individuals are respectful of others, and the Creative Commons licenses are a great way to allow others to use your work for creative projects like Orin’s wedding site. I don’t know that I could go so far as Leo or Michael and uncopyright all my work, although the concept is very intriguing. My default setting on flickr is to label everything “all rights reserved,” but I will soon undertake a project to reorganize my flickr page and I’m already looking for some pieces that I can release under a Creative Commons license. And certainly, if you would like to use a piece of my artwork for a project, drop me a line and I’d love to talk to you about it.

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