Photo by Scott Beale.

Scott Beale, who is a good friend of Metblogs has had an image stolen outright by the SF Examiner.

Another week and another one of my photos was used without permission or attribution. This time it is the The San Francisco Examiner with an article by Joshua Sabatini about Chicken John’s campaign for mayor. They used a photo I shot of Chicken John and his dog Dammit, but did not ask about using the photo or even provide a photo credit, but instead just listed the words “Courtesy photo” (does anybody know what that means?). The photo is licensed under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works). The photo was used in both the print and online versions of the Tuesday, September 25th issue.

It’s a really nasty trend for the local SF and tech media to take images off Flickr and use them sans attribution. I personally stopped posting my photos after several of these same thefts happened to me but since Scott is such a great guy he keeps plowing on and fighting the good fight. Shame on the Examiner.

Read the full story over on Laughing Squid.