How I got featured on Mashable and did nothing.
Here I was working along, designing away emails for the startup that I work at. I see my phone light up with a snapchat notification. Since I was already in my groove of designing and align things perfectly, I didn’t pay much attention to it. Fast forward to lunchtime, I pulled out my phone and went straight to snapchat. Turns out, one of friends sent me a snapchat story from Mashable saying that I was featured in their story. At this moment, my whole world came to a stop because I could not believe what I was looking at.
Mashable, in their story called, “7 things you didn’t know you agreed to in the terms of service”, featured one of my artworks from my portfolio in their story without my consent in anyway, shape or form. Sadly, by the time most of you end up reading this, the story will be removed from snapchat. However, I have taken screenshots of the article and will post it at the end of this article.
At first I thought, maybe this is just on my phone, so I asked my co-worker, Rachel, if she can open up her snapchat and see if she’s getting the results. Lo’ and behold, yes she was. At the same time, few of my other friends messaged me asking why am I on Mashable? At this point, I was pissed but laughing at the same time. Pissed because they took one of my artworks without my permission and laughing because it has not only my name in the image but also face.
Let me back track for a bit. The project that Mashable took the image from, was a redesign of LinkedIn that I did couple years back to practice everything that I learned in one of my UI/UX courses that I took. The section that image was used for, talked about LinkedIn.
Since I was fuming with anger at this point, I tweeted and emailed the writer of the article, Kellen Back, quite simply asking him why is he using my image and where did he get it from? He replied back to me saying that he got the image from LinkedIn and how everything we post on LinkedIn can be used publicly.
After reading his response, I sat there thinking, I never posted this project on LinkedIn. I know that it’s on my resume under personal projects but there are no images. All the images are either on my website or on my behance portfolio, both of which are protected by copyright laws and I clearly state that my projects cannot be used for commercial purposes. I wrote back to Mr Back explain him all of this to which he responded that “he’ll forward this to the right people”.
The irony throughout all of this was that, Mashable’s article is about agreeing to the terms when you use an online service and they clearly neglected the terms placed on my site and behance.
At this point I started to think, maybe the person who took the image from my website was blind. After all, companies do hire people with disabilities. So I ran and accessibility test omy website for blind people and found out that, even if you lack vision, you can still under the content of the footer clearly! After this I decided to check my behance, thinking maybe I placed different copyright laws on the project. But no.
All jokes aside though, I am honestly infuriated to the point where I want to punch something over what Mashable did. I hate it when big companies and media outlets take other people’s work and claim it to be theirs without giving them credit. Zara, the clothing brand did the same with pins from individual artists, and Buzzfeed constantly does the same thing.
So here is what I want from you Mashable and Mr Kellen Back, I want a formal apology written and posted on your website for the world to see. If not, I will press charges because this is copyright infringement.
Here are screenshots of the original article from Mashable.
