I’d mentioned before some of the benefits of hosting my haiku images on Flickr. Turns out there are drawbacks as well.

Yesterday I noticed one of the haiku I wrote a couple years ago (and scribbled for a handwritten post last year) was getting a noticeable amount of unattributed notoriety on various social networking sites. The same haiku has also gotten a bit of proper attribution in the past on some of the same sites, which I wholly appreciate, but lately a few Tumblrers with decent followings of their own have taken to simply copying the photo, or quoting the haiku, and giving no credit or links back to the original.

As someone who spends a lot of time creating these haiku and the corresponding images, this is frustrating. Nobody enjoys having their work go uncredited, or worse, credited to someone else. I’m no exception. It’s not that I expect to make large sums of money, or to achieve great fame, through my written efforts, but when a handful of these efforts gets noticed by a wider audience, it would nice to at least be recognized for the effort I’ve made.

I even have a specific license spelling out the terms under which I allow others to share my work. I have never had a problem with folks using my images or the haiku, provided they give me a little credit — or at least a little link love.

read more