Using photos off the web without permission for commercial purposes is theft!

Aloha all,

Man was today a wicked day on the water. I was up for a bit today without looking outside and a while after 7 a friend of mine from down Milolii direction called and asked if it was blowing here yet. I told him no and he said it would be soon. I looked outside and noticed some whitecaps (rare down here) and within a half hour or so it was whitecaps everywhere on the ocean. We have a growing northwest swell, but what made it messy was a very strong southwest wind.

Watching the news tonight, they had high wind gusts for the day. I think it hit 43 or so off Kona, 60 something at a spot on Maui and 73 (one mile below "hurricane" force) at a spot on Oahu. This morning a cruise ship was heading south past my place, and nearly an hour later, it'd only made it a few miles... that's a strong steady wind.

The cowry shell above is a Tiger Cowry (Cypraea tigris). These are technically not the largest cowry here, but in general are the largest we see. I want one. I am not in the habit of picking up shells all that often, and I will not disturb live ones (as I mentioned in an earlier post, cowries mate for life and follow each other's scent trails... you move one and the couple is busted up), but if I find an empty one it's probably gonna get pocketed.

So... as for the title of this post... I was just surfing and noticed that another dive operator in the area had a picture of a red leaf scorpion, that I TOOK, on their front page... then I checked out their other pages... OVER HALF of the photos on their site were taken by me. I'm pretty sure they probably just took them from the blog, not my www.wanna-dive-kona.com site, but in either case it's copywrite infringement. I'm not the only one they took pics from as there are fish from other oceans on their site.

I've had a person or two ask for permission to use my photos, and that's cool, they can use them all they want since they asked... all I'm looking for is credit, either by name, a link to the blog, or both. Just ask. I'm gonna have to speak with the company in question at some point soon, and I've got some fair ideas (they don't do boat dives or the night dive, I'd be happy to take referrals, I've actually sent them people before, so it's about time to turn that around), but permission should always be asked as some people really get ticked off when they see their pictures when not expected. Rant over.

I've got to go reset all our clocks, the wind caused some power outages, we were out for about 20 minutes at one point.

Later,

Steve