Some Random Band Stole My Picture

If there is one advantage to having your site’s link rank taken away (for no identifiable reason) it is that your photos and intellectual property get stolen a lot less often. It doesn’t surprise me anymore when people steal my pictures, but it is a stupid annoyance. Some years ago I spent an hour poking around sites like Zazzle and Etsy, where I found dozens of items for sale that used images from this or any of my other websites. This time it’s a band called Acoustics using one of my photos to accompany their cover of (what else?) “Payphone”, by Maroon 5.

I think I first posted this picture in 1999 on this page, which for some reason uses a line from Elvis in its <title> tag. Re-reading that page now I remember some of the skepticism I had about how authentically “random” David Letterman’s calls to the payphones outside the Ed Sullivan Theater really were.

Who wouldn’t want to steal this? I mean it’s not a bad picture, right? That’s Roseland at top center. The taillights of the cars up ahead have a certain kiss of twilight about them. The two figures walking toward 8th Avenue might have used these payphones when they passed earlier. It looks like the flash from my camera lit up the license plates of the cars parked across the street.

I called these phones a number of times but never had the luck that Letterman seemed to have in getting someone to answer or stay on the line. But I also just don’t have the kind of personality to play games like that with strangers. In spreading randomness I try to stay out of the way. I spent many nights connecting random payphones across the U.S. into conference calls, bewildering all who answered but somehow keeping them on the line long enough to engage in conversation with complete strangers. Today I’ve connected people via LinkNYC kiosks, my conduit of choice these days for making the Smart City talk to itself.

If you follow politics you might have heard stories a few months about Donald Trump or one of his posse making a threatening call from a payphone near the Ed Sullivan Theater in 2009, a scenario the FBI seems to have dismissed as ridiculous.The payphones in the photo were outside the Ed Sullivan Theater, but not across the street, as described in the FBI file on the case. So this set of phones would probably not include the payphone from which Donald Trump or one of his cohorts allegedly made that call.

I used this photo again more recently in a before-and-after piece back in 2009, and it appears the payphones seen in that story are still standing, though I’ll check in on them later this week just for the hell of it.

My photo also appears uncredited on Acoustics’ Myspace page, which claims the band is (or was) represented by KHS International. I find this song, accompanied by my photo, in numerous places across the WWW, but I cannot seem to find any way to contact the band or KHS, though I confess to not trying very hard, as the time expenditure hardly seems worth any result.

All I would want in return for use of the photo is a citation and/or a link to this website, but it is probably too late for that.

Among the many memorable discoveries I made of others using my photos without permission was an incident a few years ago when I found that the Chilean book publisher RIL Editores had used my images on several of its book covers. I made this discovery wholly by chance. No one from that publishing house asked me for permissions but I found it hard to take offense or take any action, since most of the books at least had proper citation and they had been published over a decade earlier.

I was taken aback at how one of the books had both a pianist and a payphone on its cover, seeing as I am a classical pianist with an undying interest in payphones. Could that book be about me? I asked.

No.

At first this unknown usage of my pictures seemed strange, like someone had been receiving my telephone calls and talking to whoever called as if they were me. But I took no umbrage, and even found the use of my stuff to be enchanting in a way. The amateurness of my photos and the published materials seemed to complement each other.

You can read more about that little incident at Flaneur.NYC, my mostly-secret place that’s been hiding in plain site for a few years now. More on that later, maybe.