It’s all over TechMeme that Fake Steve Jobs has lawyers after him. This is so obviously a hoax it’s laughable. I bet that not a single blogger bothered calling Apple PR to check this story out. We are such suckers sometimes.

I don’t even need to call. First of all, anyone who knows lawyers knows that they’d never send out such communications the weekend before Christmas. Lawyers don’t work then. Can we have some common sense please?

Second of all, Apple PR would never pull such a stunt like this right before taking a week off for Christmas. It’d cause too much work over the Christmas break. Can we have some common sense please?

Geesshhh.

Serves you right for believing a single thing that Fake Steve Jobs writes. The dude is FAKE. Get it? You probably believed it when he wrote he loved me, didn’t you? Can we have some common sense please?

Bloggers, when are we going to stop repeating things just so we can get onto TechMeme? When are we going to start doing real work and start calling PR (I bet most of the bloggers on TechMeme don’t even know how to contact Apple PR) and waiting for a confirmation?

At least Scott Karp called it right.

If you believe a fake blogger you deserve all the slime attached to you that you get.

Turns out that the copyright issues surrounding photography in the Bubble video are still not resolved. Now other photographers are getting involved and asking for their images to be taken out of the video and are hoping for compensation. TechCrunch has an excellent article about the issues involved. I’ve taken a few images of Mike Arrington. You’re welcome to use them for free. You don’t even need to give me attribution, although that’d be nice.

The problem is that Flickr is part of the problem.

Why?

It’s hard to find the license on this photo. Even if I wanted to say “STOP, DON’T REUSE THIS IMAGE” it’s very hard in Flickr’s interface to make it that clear — instead you get a little tiny piece of text that says “all rights reserved.” Most human beings skip over that kind of text because it’s legaleze (tell me, what’s the last time you read the legal stuff that comes up when you install some software?)

I really wish Flickr would make it clearer. It’s SO easy to make a mistake and when you do photographers can hold you hostage for payment (an employee, not me, at PodTech once made this mistake — we used an image taken at our own party on a sign without getting the photographer’s approval. That photographer made us pay thousands of dollars for that image and if we had known it would have been so expensive we would never have used his images).

It’s also not possible for me to put this image into public domain, which is what I really want to do. I want to turn over all rights to my images to YOU so YOU can do whatever you want with them. I can’t do that in Flickr.

I wish Flickr made it a LOT clearer on the photographer’s wishes.

I also really like SmugMug a lot better because as a photographer it’s very easy to put a watermark across the image. For instance, here’s a photo where I added the word “proof” on top of the image. That makes it very hard to use without giving attribution.

If we’re going to have a world where photographers want to get paid, then they need to be a LOT clearer about how they would like those images used. If I were Lane, I’d make sure every image of mine had a watermark. If hers did, they never would have been used in the video.

In the meantime, I know that at PodTech we changed our approach to using images. We don’t use anything unless we have signed approval from photographers or other media developers. It sucks, but that’s the best way to protect your business against being sued (and, if you make a mistake the photographer can set any price he/she wants after the fact. It’s very hard to prove that an image is only worth $100 after the fact, and even if you could, the standard is that you’ll pay 3x the photographers’ rate if he/she has to go after you to get payment. In PodTech’s case negotiations started at $3,000 for an image that should have cost only $100 according to professionals I contacted).

Good luck out there. If you’re ever concerned about using my images, I’ll be happy to give you any legal approvals you need. If, for some reason (if I were commissioned to do a specific assignment, for instance), I don’t want you to use the images I’ll watermark them and put them over on SmugMug. But, generally, when I do assignments like that the copyright holder is no longer me and the copyright holder usually doesn’t appreciate their images being placed up on Flickr or other public photo sharing sites.

Some of the LeWeb3 conference videos are now up. Nice quality too. I’ll point out some of my favorite sessions, as they come up. For instance, here’s one of Evan Williams, who gave an interesting talk about how you can make new products by taking away features (his company did Twitter).

Hans Rosling, Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institutet and Director of Gapminder Foundation, changed how I see the world through some very interesting graphs.

See, if you pay PR people millions and millions they’ll get you on lists like the Forbes Web Celeb 25.

I’m just joking about paying PR people to get me on lists like this. I don’t have money to pay PR people. Seriously there are a lot of people who are far more deserving of Web fame than me.

Like who?

Well, any list of Web celebs that doesn’t have Joe Hewitt on it isn’t a good one in my book. He wrote the iPhone app for Facebook.

The inventor of the Web isn’t on this list. Where’s Joel Spolsky? He has more readers than I do. Tim O’Reilly isn’t on this list. Neither is Mark Cuban (who just became a Facebook whale with 5,000 friends). Where’s the two guys who started Google? Or, heck, Ev Williams who funded Twitter? Loic Le Meur? He has a Web conference with 2,000 attendees and a video site that’s seeing 1,000 new videos a day. How about the YouTube team? Or the guy who did “Will it Blend?” Or Bre Petis of Make Magazine? Or Hugh Macleod? And Fake Steve Jobs? That’s fine, but where’s Uncov? They are just as biting as FSJ or Valleywag but they actually code so their insults have more teeth. Jay Smooth? I love that dude. Doc Searls? The three co-founders of BlogHer? Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon, founders of Global Voices Online? Leo Laporte? (his radio shows and This Week in Tech are listened to by hundreds of thousands. John Dvorak?

OK, it’s almost 3 a.m. and I’m just getting started. There’s a LOT more people who deserve to be on such a list than me and that’s not just fake humility either.

I am honored, though. I just wish these lists were more inclusive. Who deserves to be on this list in your view?

I’ll be seeing John Battelle later this afternoon and will try to get him on video about how well his predictions for 2007 went (for the past few years I’ve enjoyed his predictions for the next year more than any other blogger/journalist).

Here, let’s do a little scorecard for John based on how well his predictions did this year.

1. Right. Microsoft bought aQuantive for $6 billion and bought a sliver of Facebook. Negative points for trying to predict that AOL would go public.

2. Wrong. I don’t remember anyone saying that Web 2.0 bubble has burst, just that there is one.

3. Right. YouTube now has its videos on Google’s main search engine. Look for “Martin Luther King” for instance and you see his “I have a dream” speech.

4. Right. Google’s video ads have just started getting going and are far from a home run.

5. Right. Yahoo did not regain its luster, but did replace the CEO.

6. Wrong. eBay hasn’t made major changes to its executive leadership.

7. Right. Amazon has continued kicking butt in the web service space. Negative points for saying that the market will punish it. If anything the market has been supportive.

8. Mostly wrong. Wallstrip was acquired. Several others are on the block. But haven’t seen major content moves unless I’m missing something. I think John should extend this prediction to 2008 because I know several media companies are getting ready to acquire content plays.

9. Neutral. I’m seeing a LOT more traffic moving to RSS, but that’s a trend that hasn’t hit advertising in a big way yet. New metrics are definitely coming out all the time, though, to help advertisers track usage on AJAX, video, and RSS-centric sites.

10. Right. My blog definitely needs a redesign now that we have Twitter, Facebook, streaming video, etc.

11. Right. Facebook screwed up the privacy/trust issue.

12. Right. Google has gotten heck in the mainstream media.

13. Right. Mobile finally arrived in the US market with the iPhone.

Damn, mostly right. It’ll be an interesting morning.