This information is now outdated:

[edit] Wow. Now my name is apparently “Brian Lewis.” Oh, Boston Globe. I wonder if there’s a guy out there named Brian Lewis wondering who this Maria Varmazis is and why her name is on one of his photos.[/edit]

I got an email two days ago from the Boston Globe asking me if they could run one of my photos of the flash mob pillow fight in print and online, and, thinking little of it, I replied that indeed they could.

Though I was pretty tickled to see my photo on boston.com today (also here), I was rather disappointed when I saw the photo credit. Apparently my new name is “file photo.”

In case the link expires, here’s a screen capture:

C’mon, Globe. Really now. How hard it is to run a link to a source? That’s Internet Protocol 101 right there.

I suppose I should email them and ask for a credit, but did I really have to spell it out explicitly that they should credit me for a photo that I took? Shouldn’t they be doing that anyway?

An example of getting it right? UniversalHub ran my photo not long after the event. Thanks, Adam!

Some of the blame here is on me. Previously the photos were “all rights reserved,” but there was no explicit statement requiring credit. But that’s easy enough to fix and I’ve now put a Creative Commons license on all my photographs, stating that attribution is now required for use, even though 99.999% of my photos are measly snapshots of minutiae. Lesson learned!