So my good friend over at the wonderful website http://www.BarkSlope.com just had some of his original images ripped off by a kind of lousy website that was too lazy to photograph the products themselves. Needless to say, my friend is pretty upset since they didn’t even bother to ask him to use the images.
I, on the other hand, have the opposite problem. In Chicago, at the Backer trade show, our neighbors were the very cool guys from Rubit! — the clip on dog tag holder company. Now these guys have it made. They have brought to market the best idea since the dog tag itself. This little gadget allows owners to easly switch their dog tags from collar to collar – which is great for our customers that have more than one of our collar designs. We knew that we HAD to carry these on our site.
Since they are such a new company, I had problems finding stock images to use, so I took my own. This wasn’t a problem at all since now our customers can see how cool Rubits look on our collars and I love any excuse to pull out my trusty Canon SLR camera!
But I also had a secret hope. I was hoping that some sites WOULD rip off my image. Mimi Green is also a fairly new company and I take great joy in spreading the word about our collars. Plus I figured since Rubit hasn’t released a ton of images yet that ours would stand out.
Today I was almost as sad as my friend at Bark Slope was when a simple google image search told me that NO ONE had borrowed my super cool Rubit images! What the heck, right!?!
So here is my public offering — should you be reading this and you would like to use my Rubit images, feel free, very free.
However, we should all remember that the internet is a tricky beast. I want folks to use these particular images, but its all for shamless promotion. We must respect each other enough to ask other sites should we want to use their images. Stealing to avoid extra work is not cool.
But don’t think of using my Rubit images as “stealing”, lets just call it “borrowing”. And when your customers ask what crazy awesome collars those Rubits are attached to, don’t forget to tell them they are MIMI GREEN!!
PS: Second public decloration of the day — I WILL take better care of this blog. I love it, I do, but Mimi Green has been busy beyond words lately. Will post more about that soon too. Growing is great, but boy has it be exhausting!
Double PS: Rubits rock. I have them on all my doggies since I can NEVER get their tags on and off easily. These make switching collars a sinch. Rubits are on my must buy list for all dog and cat owners!
xo– amanda