2008-12-09
ffffound / ddddownload
In a moment of procrastination, I noticed that ddddownload (previously) was at the top of the delicious home page (with 150+ links). Noting a mention of swissmiss, I saw her post about it, and this comment:
FFFFFound is a pretty lousy company as they disregard copyright laws. I know from experience; they’ve posted pictures of mine without any credit to me.
This new download only makes things worse.
I notice that “Olivia” doesn’t provide a URL, so I can’t tell who she is, or which images have been reused. However, ffffound have been known to do copyright takedowns, so presumably she hasn’t complained.
Personally, I think the easiest way to beat this is to be more open, not less. If you post your images in a Flash slideshow, but people still like them enough, they’ll just screengrab them and post to their own websites. When they end up on ffffound, the attribution chain (already meagre at best (previously) is completely broken. On the other hand, if you’d just made the image available, then there’s more of a chance that the bookmarks would point directly to your work on your site.
On the other hand, she probably has a point. As I said yesterday, ddddownload strips what little metadata there is on a ffffound image away entirely, leaving you with only image filenames. Please, general-projects, fix that. (Hell, I’ll even try and learn PHP if you can accept the coding help.)
Meanwhile, while I’m in one of my occasional ffffound posts, I’m pretty peeved at the practices of some of the big names in design blogging. Both swissmiss and fubiz now seem to crosspost every image to the site, which has a couple of nasty effects.
Firstly, swissmiss bookmarks from the front page, not the article page, so the link above the image is useless once the image is more than a few days old. (fubiz used to do this, but thankfully don’t any more.) This is all the more annoying as a more specific URL from a user that follows isn’t used in preference.
Secondly, ffffound’s automatic following system seems to be based on comparing who posts things (first? before? as well as?) that you also post. When you end up with a blogger tagged as one of your favorite users, that can drown the autogenerated “new for you” page with their posts, while your quieter, more interesting “real” peers suffer. Of course, the lack of any tools for editing followers means there’s nothing you can do to block them short of finding which images offend and removing them.
Even so, ffffound continues to be worth looking at for me, and given people still seem to be hunting for invites, they must be doing something right.
