I am alive, I truly am. I appologise for my absence, I just haven’t had anything to entertain you all with. Truthfully I have been rather busy.

I’ve actually been cleaning up this site making sure all coding is perfect and correct. I’m up to the tutorials section and that needs a good revamp. I do have content waiting but I really want to get the validating and cleaning out of the way first.

I guess I should blog about something. So I think they whole ‘OMGZ you can’t do celebrity layouts anymore, it’s like illegal’ shall be my subject. What do I think? I agree it actually is illegal, but what isn’t these days really. Pretty much every fan site you see is illegal in some way or another. Even if you buy the rights to the photos you still can’t display them on your site or layout, so really why waste your money? I find the only people who will try sue you are those who actually are greedy, alot of photographers actually don’t mind small sites or designers earning a little here and there. The issue is more on a commercial scale, so meaning big businesses or groups. Legally they actually have to warn you before taking action, so just comply to the demands and take your layout or graphics down, don’t argue or ignore. Most actually see the value of promotion our sites have to them, but will either ask for a link back or use of tagged photos.

I think it’s bullshit, if someone contacts you then just know they are a greedy asshole because most actually don’t care. But really this has been going on for years so I don’t understand what the sudden ‘panic’ is. What I hate seeing at the moment is people bashing those who do use celeb layouts because they are all scared and have just gone to creating their own layouts, that’s really rude, okay fair enough you’re worried but just because you believe in that way doesn’t give you the right to force your opinions on others, we all can make our own decisions on this, so have a little respect people.

But just for those who might have a little tanty over my layout, shut up now, the images are from be-scene.org, a site to which I own with my BFF Brooke, and 80% of the images have been given permission to be used by the photographers.

But actually the real truth is, in ordered to be sued they’d actually would have to prove a few things and one is if the use of the copyrighted image diminished their sales. It’s all under Fair Use Copyright, so that’s why I think the issue is more on a commercial scale because on a commercial scale the use of a copyrighted material could diminish their sales. Read it all here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use and for Internet use you should read the section Fair use on the Internet. You might actually change your opinion.