Adobe vs Macromedia

In 2004, I was browsing through my phoons website statistics, and I discovered an unfamiliar web page address, something about "upcoming events". Tracing it, I discovered that someone had created a web page to advertise some Adobe training session coming up the next week. And their web page was linking directly a photo on my Phoons site that I had taken of my friend phooning in front of the Adobe headquarters. With some HTML magic, they were displaying my site's photo at about 1/4 scale on their site. (If you click the image to the right, you can see MY page and see what photo they were "borrowing".)

They had contact information on their page, so I emailed them and left a phone message to the effect, "You're using my copyrighted image without my permission. Please remove it."

After a time of them having neither responded nor taken action, I decided to have some fun. I made a backup copy of my original photo. Then I replaced it on my site with the logo of a key competitor of Adobe: Macromedia. I added the word BUY. Yep, sure enough, when I visited their web site, my BUY Macromedia image shone prominently.

I had expressed to my brother in my original email to him, "For the time being,
if people visit the Adobe ad page, they'll see what I've attached. :) Hey, that oughta get a few more emails coming in to their group to change the picture :)"

Ha, I wish I could've heard the behind-the-scenes scrambling. Imagine if the folks who discovered it had no idea how to change their web page because they'd hired someone else to set up the web page for them and that person wasn't available over the weekend.

I also sent my brother the second version I had created. Its origin? I already had a photo I had created of Dad and birds. My sister had taken a photo of Dad standing in her patio doorway with a BB gun, shooing away pesky starlings. I had photoshop'd it to add starlings all over him--plus a huge one in a rocking chair nearby. It was easy, then, to use that as the backdrop for the latest BUY Macromedia picture. (Note the big bird, lower right.)

Before I could substitute in this second version, I discovered that those folks had fixed their web page. Never any communication with me. Sigh. No opportunity to use version #2 on their web page!

Fun memory. Thanks, David, for finding this treasure in your old emails!