Ha! This just occured to me:

Photog Sues After Picture Appears On Burundi Currency

[Kelly] Fajack says he’s not a litigious person and would give groups like NGOs permission to use his images for free. He says he probably would have granted Burundi officials permission to use his picture on their money if they had asked. “Like I said in my lawsuit, I’m not out to take money from a poor African nation,” he says. “In a way I’m honored that my image is on a little piece of African history.”

(found via Boing Boing)

Umm, perhaps someone should tell this guy about the Creative Commons Developing Nations License?

The Developing Nations license allows you to invite a wide range of royalty-free uses of your work in developing nations while retaining your full copyright in the developed world.

Update: There you go, I just sent the dude an email.

I must admit I find it disingenuous that while Fajack is pursuing legal action against Burundi (and those responsible for their currency design), he’s also prominently highlighting their “infringement” of his work in his online bio (since at least May 2):

Recently his photography was…depicted on the 10,000 franc note in the African country of Burundi.

I’m not sure you can simultaneously condemn and celebrate copyright infringement. Kind of takes the oomph out of suing for “unspecified damages.”

Regina Gleeson, curator of the Better Than the Real Thing? project, has a website, culturalfishing.net, whose header image currently includes a laptop sitting on a desk, displaying a closeup of my blog, justinsomnia.org, which at the time happened to be displaying a neatlink homage to Magritte with an image of Martin Shannon’s excellent Self-portrait as Amanda Coogan as David with Cattle.

Via Boing Boing today I read this quote:

Everything you love, everything meaningful with depth and history, all passionate authentic experiences will be appropriated, mishandled, watered down, cheapened, repackaged, marketed and sold to the people you hate.

…in reference to the mass marketing of “Von Dutch”. This was one of those occasions where I was like, Von Dutch who? Wikipedia to the rescue. Oh good. So now I know. One more thing added to my brain.

But then my attention shifted back to that straight outta Fight Club quote. Apparently it comes from this blog post by Mr. Jalopy, wholly unrelated to Von Dutch, but more a criticism of the post-modern tendency for creators to disrespect (or rebel against) the origins, traditions, and limitations of their medium.

I immediately took issue with its pessimism. In the worst case scenario, it could be inadvertantly construed as an argument in favor of even stronger copyright restrictions, a very un-Boing-Boingian theme (though I’m sure the Von Dutch heirs are very much on top of guarding the copyrights and trademarks they inherited).

One of the risks of a limited copyright (or a Founder’s Copyright) is that indeed everything meaningful may be appropriated, mishandled, watered down, cheapened, repackaged, marketed and sold to the people you hate. But all that won’t necessarily happen. There’s a chance a lot of good could happen—which is why I release all my photo galleries into the public domain.

I think Jimmy Wales said it best, namely that “complex permission schemes also prevent people from doing good“

Ben Godfrey and his girlfriend Louise are going to be cycling across Cambodia in November to raise money for Oxfam. How cool.

He emailed me to say that he was going to use a photo I took of the Smiling Buddha Faces on the towers of the Bayon temple in Angkor Thom for his website’s banner image. Looks good, huh?

Best of luck to them both!