Image problems

BY Sajan Venniyoor| IN Digital Media | 26/01/2010

A year ago, the Andaman & Nicobar administration decided to revamp its somewhat dowdy website. The nameless NIC web-designer who was given the task, no doubt in what he considered a tribute to national integration, photoshopped the images of Gandhi and Netaji along with generic representatives from India's major religions for the site's header. As it turned out, the Muslim whose image he picked for collage was Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, the head of Pakistan's Laskhar-e-Taiba, a banned terrorist organization. The picture was apparently lifted from a BBC online profile of Saeed.

So, when a former Pakistani Air Chief Marshal appears in an ad for the girl child in major Indian newspapers, there's a certain sense of d'j' vu, for it only highlights on a larger canvas the ease 'and stupidity ' of downloading pictures from the World Wide Web without either understanding the context or respecting someone else's copyright.

If you run a search for 'air chief marshal' on Google Images, retired PAF Chief Tanvir Ahmed's now-iconic image is among the first to pop up, in sufficiently high resolution to be picked up by an unthinking graphic artist or ministry PRO on the prowl for a soldierly figure to ask the hypothetical question, 'Where would you be if your mother was not allowed to be born?? (From the way the image has been cropped ' to remove a tell-tale URL ' my guess is that they lifted it off a blog, China Military Power Mashup, but it's probably a standard publicity mug-shot that could have been picked up from a number of news sites. Incidentally, the blog clearly states that all its images are subject to copyright. But then, Google Image Search also warns that its pictures may be subject to copyright, but that hasn?t stopped anyone either).

The other images on the National Girl Child Day advertisement (in the Times of India etc, 24 Jan 2010) were undeniably picked off the Net, too: just run a Google Image search for 'Amjad Ali Khan' or 'Kapil Dev' and see what comes up on the first page of search results.

In July 2008, images of Jesus Christ with a can of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other appeared ' within days of each other ' on the cover an official journal of the Catholic diocese of Neyyatinkara, in south Kerala and within the pages of an Andhra Pradesh daily, Sakshi, owned by the late Chief Minister, Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy's family, devout Christians all. The Bishop of the diocese ' like the Minister for Women and Child Development who sprang to the defence of the botched girl child ad ' was quick to blame the boo-boo on some nameless other, but the fact remains that neither our government departments nor many of our revered institutions have any qualms about lifting copyrighted images off the web, frequently with disastrous results.  

This particular artwork, an irreverently doctored version of the popular Sacred Heart icon, is perhaps the most misused online image of all. A year before the Neyyatinkara diocese?s faux pas, the Malaysian Tamil newspaper ' Makkal Osai ' had been suspended for a month for publishing a similar impious image on its front page in its 'Thought for the Day' section.

Apparently, it is not just Indians who fall prey to the temptation of easy image downloads from the net. Shortly after Barack Obama's election, a copyright row erupted over his iconic 'HOPE' poster, which shows a meditative Barack Obama ?splashed in a Warholesque red, white and blue?, gazing upward into the middle distance. Associated Press (AP), which owns the rights to the original photograph, promptly brought a copyright infringement case around its misuse. The artist, Shepard Fairey, admitted that he had taken the photo off the net ' from Google Images, where else'  but claimed 'fair use'. AP wasn't convinced.

Google itself has been sued in the US (where it won) and Germany (where it lost) for copyright violations linked to the display of thumbnails of copyrighted images on its Image Search.

Picking random images off the net is not only unethical, it is potentially dangerous as well. On 15 January 2010, the FBI got egg all over its face for using a Spanish MP's photo to create a 'Most Wanted' poster of Osama Bin Laden. Gaspar Llamazares, the politician whose 'hair and parts of face? appeared on the Bin Laden poster, said he would no longer feel safe traveling to the US. The FBI later admitted that its forensic artist had taken certain facial features "from a photograph he found on the internet".