Family's Christmas Photos Hawk Groceries In Prague

Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that Jeff and Danielle Smith sent a photo of themselves with their two young children to family and friends as a Christmas card, and posted the image on her blog and a few social networking websites. Then, last month, a friend of the family was vacationing in the Czech Republic when he spotted a full size poster of the Missouri family's smiling faces in the window of a local supermarket in Prague, advertising a grocery delivery service. The friend snapped a few pictures and sent them to the Smiths, who were flabbergasted. Mario Bertuccio, who owns the Grazie store in Prague, admitted that he had found the photo online but thought it was computer-generated and promised to remove it, and 'We'll be happy to write an e-mail with our apology,' he says. Meanwhile Mrs. Smith has received 180,000 visitors and over 500 comments on her blog since she posted the story. She says she is glad the photo wasn't used in an unseemly manner. 'Interesting. Bizarre. Flattering, I suppose,' writes Mrs. Smith. 'But quite creepy.'"

Comments

Really...

[NervousNerd]

Anything (well unless it's something I'm trying to find) you post on the internet can be found. It's common sense.

Re:Really...

[JWSmythe]

    His admission of guilt and means of acquiring the photo appeared to be a second hand quote. Hearsay, if you will.

    More than likely, he hired someone to do his advertising campaign or at least make the graphics for it. I can't say that I've known many business owners who do their own graphics work, unless it's a graphics firm. They would be the ones that made the photo, and edited the background and text into it. Not an amazing feat, but it was done none the less.

    Probably whoever did it was confident in that no one would ever find out. Heck, who would expect that someone who knew the family in America would happen to travel to the Czech Republic and happen to spot the sign? It's not to say that it was right by any means, it just was impractical to think that they would find out.

    Hell, one of the edited photos that I made, which had absolutely no bearing on the original other than the human form (substantially edited even at that), showed up on a national news broadcast. It was the main image from my site, and showed up in a flash in a set of other photos showing anonymity on the Internet. No, we didn't catch it on the DVR, and I didn't care enough to try to find the clip online to verify it and complain about it, but it was still my original work used improperly by a major broadcast company. If I hadn't happened to have looked at the TV just then, I wouldn't have even known it ever happened. People are generally pretty confident in the idea of "what they don't know won't hurt them."

    Hopefully they learned a little something from this. Don't post hi res pictures. There's no need to anyways, bring it down to a reasonable displayed resolution. If they had, that photo would have been skipped over and another would have been used. As it is, that photo is probably floating around in a few stock photo libraries now, tagged as "average family, man woman children". Maybe whoever stole it assumed that it was already a stock photo, so they were even less likely to get caught.

    I've seen that quite a bit. Places use stock photos that they were provided, but don't know anything about the original licensing. Consider going to a template site. Do you *know* that every photo there is properly licensed for resale? Maybe they're only licensed for the first user, and you're way out of line reusing it on your project, and/or reselling to someone else. Maybe when the same webmaster reuses it on a dozen sites, they were breaking the license for all of them.

    So, shoot your own damned photos, and then you're sure. :) You want to put an average family up on a billboard, put a Craigslist ad up for an average family photoshoot, and pay the $50 it would take to get them to come to you, and sign the model releases.

Re:Really...

[YourExperiment]

Read my sig and guess where I am from :-)

Hmm, somewhere that has only a loose grasp of English grammar and apostrophe use... the USA? :)

For chrissakes, you're American, right?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Do it right.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002168937_coffeemug03.html

Sue them.

Re:For chrissakes, you're American, right?

[TheLink]

Trying to use the Wheels of Justice to grind Nescafe...

I wonder what will be the grounds for their decision.

Anyone going to spill the beans?

its a new kind of internet weirdness

[circletimessquare]

other (funnier) examples of global clashing with local:

http://boingboing.net/2008/07/15/chinese-restaurant-c.html

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/bert.asp

Not Stolen. Nope. Not At All.

[Karganeth]

From http://digg.com/odd_stuff/Stolen_picture_used_on_a_huge_billboard_in_another_country "Her blog post and most of the comments here are retarded. That image was not stolen. There's no way that large format print was produced from a 500 pixel wide Facebook rip. If you read her post she says a professional photographer "friend" took the image. The friend most likely sold it to a microstock agency which is where the design agency for the Czech supermarket chain bought it and is now denying it. With tens of thousands of decent quality high resolution images taken on pro/semi-pro equipment available for a few dollars each on microstock sites, there's no way any designer would troll blogs to find a usable random photo of a family among point&shoot and low rez photos."

Do it better

[SuperKendall]

Don't sue them. Give them permission.

How cool is it to have your family shown in Prague? As noted it's not for unseemly use, and it's some small grocer just trying to get by.

Don't make him go to the expense (and waste) of having to print a new poster.

Instead, do the adult thing - accept the apology and let him keep using the image officially until he moves on. Everyone wins.

I wouldn't be so sure

[Chuck Chunder]

Perhaps the supermarket has access to the same sort of computers as they use on CSI, NCIS etc. They probably have 3d models of the family, reconstructed based on DNA obtained by enhancing the Facespace photo and zooming in to the atomic level.

It's not giving up. It's solving for the answer.

[SuperKendall]

In this day and age of feel-good, everyone's a winner anti-competitiveness, it should be no surprise that someone would come along and claim that giving up is the same as winning.

Incorrect. It's not giving up at all. In fact it's rather the opposite - it's obtaining the best possible result from the situation.

Sue the owner? We all know they would get nothing. A store owner would be out of business, and the family would be out legal expenses. A great ending if you're a law firm.

Tell him to take it down? Again, how have you really "won" anything. You have caused more waste through reprinting. You have done some harm to a small business, and done nothing at all to help your family. Your family looks like cads.

So you explain to me how saying "you know what, just keep using the photo and retire it when you are ready" is not the most sensible and best result possible. The family gets a kick out of knowing they will be seen in another country, again in a positive fashion. The grocer gets to keep using a nice photo, and again everyone wins - not because of anti weird anti-competitvness (which I abhor) but because in the best human fashion you have solved for the most optimal result.

There are plenty of other conditions in which I would say fighting would be the best option. You make the mistake of not realizing conditions can determine the best solution, and this is not one of the conditions in which a solution you seem to be advocating (fighting) is best.

Of course we all know at this point the true story is that it was obtained as a stock photo, which means he's not using the photo improperly at all and if anything the family needs to have a word with the friend who sold them to microstock without asking. Is she making money off them? Well then, that's a whole different story...

Re:It's not giving up. It's solving for the answer

[Ogive17]

All I would ask is to have the grocer send me one of the posters. I would think it would make a great wall hanging for a rec room. A picture of your family advertising the weekly sale in a foreign language.... great conversational piece!