My photo of a Jaguar E-Type from Flickr being used on Gap clothing designs
Image by Chris Devers
I’m sure that The Gap has a totally awesome explanation for why this photo of mine, published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) license, is apparently being used on the Grey Pumice versions of the "Thermal body double" onesie (SKU #785589) and the 2-in-1 moto one-piece (SKU #785593) at gap.com.
The two images are clearly related to each other.
I eagerly await the Gap’s response.
I have various thoughts about what’s going on here — for example, the mind-boggling idea that some unknown factory in southeast Asia somewhere is cranking out thousands of .95 tshirts with my photo on them on behalf of the Gap, and yet they never attempted to contact me about their use of my work — but I’m trying to keep most of my thoughts to myself until Gap has a chance to respond.
This has come up, after all, on a Sunday afternoon, and I doubt the people there I tried to contact about this will find out until Monday morning. So I’ll give them a day or so to formulate a response and get things moving to get this rectified.
That said, I appreciate all the Tweets & Re-Tweets, the articles in Jezebel & others, the mentions in local media, the Facebook comments, etc. Keep ‘em coming, by all means.
But I’m going to try to mostly hold my tongue & give them a fair chance to respond before I write much more.
Your turn, Gap.
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Addendum: By "your turn, Gap", I wasn’t expecting anything like this.
• • •
News sources & blogs that have picked this up so far, in no particular order:
• Jezebel | Did The Gap Steal This Image From Flickr? (absolute tsunami of traffic from this one, thank you)
• A whole bunch of people are getting here from Reddit, apparently via Gap Pulls A Shepard Fairey and Gap Steals a Guy’s Flickr Photo for Baby Gap Outfit, but mostly from their home page (!!).
• This Week in Photo | TWiP #187 — Crowd-Funded Photography
• You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice | My photo of a Jaguar E-Type from Flickr being used on Gap clothing designs
• Photography on the Net, Canon Digital Photography Forums | GAP Clothing company allegedly rips off Flickr member’s photo
• SFist | The Gap Rips Off Hobbyist’s Flickr Photo for Baby-Sized T-Shirt
• news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2169414 (they don’t really seem to do titles)
• Reddit | Gap Steals a Guy’s Flickr Photo for Baby Gap Outfit
• PetaPixel | Gap Uses Flickr Photo for Clothing Graphic without Permission (very handy rollover illustration on this one, thank you!)
• MediaBisto Unbeige | The Gap Accused of Stealing Flickr Photo, Reprinting Design on Shirt
• Styleite | Did The Gap Steal This Car Photo From Flickr?
• Styleite | Marka Hansen And The Trouble With Gap
• A Photo Editor | Gap Pulls A Shepard Fairey
• Lovelyish | Gap Steals Car Photo from Flickr
• Geek | Gap accused of stealing Flickr photo for shirt designs
• Small Aperture | Oh Gap, get it together!
• Allston City Limits | Gone in 60 seconds (points for the original title on this one)
• MakeupAlley | Horrible. Gap uses a Flickr users photo on tees without permission (chat board, need registration to see past comment titles)
• Laughing Squid, and a whole bunch of other Tumblr users.
• Secret Photo Nerds | – (yet another registration-only discussion site, no idea what this is)
• NU | Gap steelt afbeelding (Dutch; English translation: "Gap Steals Image")
• Design Taxi | Did Gap Use Flickr Photo for Its Designs? (Is this a spam site? Bafflingly, the comments seem to be about something else entirely.)
• Futomaki | Kolejny dzień, kolejna afera (Polish; English translation: "Another day, another scandal")
• Panophoto | Gap utilise des images Flickr sans s’acquitter des droits (French forum; English translation: "Gap uses Flickr images without paying duties")
Thank you all.
