Saturday, November 13th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
I’m curious about the provenance of this girls-kissing image, which I’m guessing might come from a pre-Hays-Code Hollywood movie:
Anybody know more about it?
As for where I found it, that was on a Tumblr site I won’t be crediting. I’ve had a little rant building about that. It’s too boring for its own post, so here it is:
I have a rule of thumb about [not] crediting certain Tumblr sites. It boils down to whether or not the Tumblr-site in question is making even a minimal effort to credit their own sources. If they are not, and especially if they’re not and I’ve seen three or more items from ErosBlog on their Tumblr without link credit, then fuck ’em.
It gets me bitched at in the comments occasionally — especially when the person the Tumblr swiped from, finds their picture here and assumes I stole the picture directly — but I have my reasons.
Tumblr sites come in several basic styles:
- There’s the “everything is a reblog” site. These are harmless and often fun — a person surfs other Tumblrs, hits the reblog button when they see an image they like, creates a personally-unique image stream as a result and leaves intact as much attribution as they found. I always try to attribute these. (But, like everybody else, I have many images on my hard drive that may been right-click-saved from one of these at some point. Perfection is impossible.)
- There’s the “lots of original scans” site. These are rare but valuable; they feed the Tumblr ecosystem. Somebody is making original posts based on taking images on paper (or film) and feeding them through a scanner. Usually there are some words of attribution that accompany these. I always try to attribute these. (But, like everybody else, I have many images on my hard drive that may been right-click-saved from one of these at some point. Perfection is impossible. I am repeating myself because it’s important to keep it in mind; lack of attribution, my own and others, is most often because the ability to attribute has been lost, and not because of unwillingness to attribute.)
- There’s the “cleaning my hard drive” site. These are common, probably the most common, and usually are mixed with lots of reposts. People who have been right-click-saving for years now finally have a way to share the images they enjoy, so they are Tumblr-posting them in an orgy of self-expression. The amount of attribution varies, but is usually slight-to-rare. Charitably speaking, we can assume these folks have forgotten which blogs and porn sites and image forums and newsgroups and dial-up bulletin boards (kickin’ it old school!) they harvested the images from. I generally give these folks the benefit of the doubt and will attribute, at least until I spot something to tip the balance away from doubt (like a lot of porn photos from recent photoshoots with the watermarks removed, or multiple uncredited pictures from the last week on ErosBlog.)
- Finally, there’s the “pure ripoff” Tumblr site. These look like “cleaning my hard drive” sites except there’s no hard drive collection, they’re just building a feed out of stuff they repost without credit from wherever they can find it. You can’t ever be 100% sure about this of course, but the the true “cleaning my hard drive” guy typically has some pictures he knows something about and a bunch he doesn’t, which means you’ll get some attributions from time to time. The “pure ripoff” guy never attributes anything, except sometimes Tumbr reposts because they’re automatic. Another way to spot these is that because they aren’t working from an archived of right-click-saved treasures, all of their pictures tend to be “current” — if you spend as much time looking at dirty pictures as I do, you’ll be able to surf through the stream and say where most of them came from, or at least recognize them as something you saw elsewhere in the past month. It’s my strong belief that this last sort of Tumblr site should not receive link credit, any more than the pirate boards or the Russian porn-swap forums. And so, from me at least, they don’t.
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