Do a search for Rob Jarvis photography and you’ll turn up his website, which seems to be mainly a Facebook page, his Flickr stream, Twitter account etc etc etc. You’ll see a wide variety of great photographs. You’ll also find he’s copyrighted those photo’s which seems a sensible step. Protect his IP and all that malarky. Except, not all the photo’s are his. Some have been stolen from Flickr users. In fact, there’s nothing to prove that any of those photo’s are his.
Meg Pickard tweeted that Rob had copied one of her photo’s and copyrighted it as his on Facebook. Theft. I along with a few other left reviews on Facebook, comments and reported the page. Rob quickly took the reviews down, deleted comments and removed a couple of the photo’s that had been mentioned by commenters – some things you can’t remove though.
You can also find a copy of some of the comments made before they were deleted here – http://www.flickr.com/photos/version-3-point-1/4263212273/. Hopefully Facebook will look at the complaints people have made and act accordingly. Would be nice if Rob actually commented on his theft, owned up, apologised even. I doubt it. Meg followed up with a thoughtful post on copyright theft. Well worth a read. I never restrict anything on Flickr, thinking none of my images are worth anything anyway but then again, if they were used it would be nice to get the credit. Something to think about. Looking forward to that apology Rob.