I was screwing around again on the web and started to really wonder about whether or not it is right to lift pictures from other sites and use them on your own. There are soooo many sites with the same content, I just always looked at it as, … well, maybe not ‘wrong’ per se, but improper at least. I refrained from doing it because I didn’t like it. However, unless the image or webpage is copyrighted, it is fair game as far as the law goes. (As I understand it anyway…)
The other day I was looking at a friend’s website and saw that they had lifted pictures of me and of Teresa from this site. I was a little freaked out about it and although I know putting anything on the web is fair game to be stolen by anybody, I had assumed (wrongly) that a friend would ask permission before doing that. The worst part is that these pictures are reposted out of proportion and are distorted. Nothing like seeing a 3″x5″ picture of yourself displayed at 3″x3″. I look like a freaking gnome! Teresa’s already paranoid about having her picture on the site, now she’s been lifted and put on another site and although it is the same photo, it looks like a close up shot taken with a wide angle lens! If you’re going to steal pictures from sites, at least repost them properly.
This all started last year. I saw an image that really made me laugh. One of those simple/almost stupid little bits that for some reason really grabbed me. I wanted to put it on my webpage so you all could see it so I made contact with the person whose site I saw it on and asked permission. She said I was welcome to use the image all I wanted but I suddenly got the impression that she didn’t create it. I could have just re-created it from scratch it was so simple (as you’ll see below) but I just didn’t feel right about it.
My blind ignorance can really be so glaring at times… I typed it into Google just to see if I could get any more info on the image or possibly see who created it. I wasn’t expecting much. It turned out to be one of the biggest “underground” images of it’s type. I say underground because I’m not part of the whole fark/gamer/photoshop crowd.
Yes, it’s the infamous “Every Time You Masturbate, God Kills A Kitten” image…
Hey man, I didn’t know. How lame is it of me to only just NOW be catching on to this? So, after a little reading, I found out the image has become so widely used that they have named the kitten Cliche Kitty. The little monsters chasing “cliche kitten” are called Domo-kuns. They are from a Japanese children’s show. They fart and drink hard-cider. This thing has flooded e-mail boxes around the world. There have been numerous parodies of the image including, “Every time you kill a kitten, God masturbates”. I can’t post that image… It has become the new “Got Milk?”. Everyone has altered and adopted the catch phrase to their purpose. So what if I’m a little behind the times. I’m just not geeky enough to be “in” on all that I guess…
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