Posted byI found Offbeat Bride through Wedinator — it was linked under one of the comments of a photo posted there. Wedinator tends to bash strange wedding choices. However, after reading Offbeat Bride, I discovered a number of photos from Wedinator had appeared here first. What's your opinion on all this? Some of the comments over there can be rather closed minded. -Sarah
Ah yes. Wedinator. Well, let me say this right off the bat: Since the whole point of Wedinator is making fun of people's weddings, of course it's not really my style. But it's a great big internet, and they've got every right to their snarky little corner of it.
Now, having said that, of course I have some opinions on the matter…
So sure: Wedinator isn't my thang when it comes to tone, but that's just a matter of taste. My only actual beef with them is that they feature unsourced photos. I've brought this up with their editors, and they respond that they don't have control over it when users submit photos without a source, and that as soon as someone identifies an image, they always credit it. Thankfully, Offbeat Bride has enough readers that Wedinator commenters usually recognize OBB photos pretty quickly — as you evidently found by seeing Offbeat Bride referenced on the site!
Amusingly, every exchange I've had with the Wedinator folks always ends with a friendly, “We love Offbeat Bride!” and well, of course they do — we're a treasure trove of free content for their site!
Ultimately, I have no control what happens to photos and content once it's posted on Offbeat Bride. Of course it would be cool if everyone on the internet played nice, but the reality of the situation is that photos and stories get lifted from Offbeat Bride every day … sometimes we get mentioned as a source, and sometimes we don't.
Offbeat Bride is a gold mine for writers looking for sources. I know that there's at least one writer quietly mining the Offbeat Bride community for book material right now, and I'm frequently contacted by journalists looking for brides to talk to. Some of these journalists credit Offbeat Bride as a source in their final pieces, and some of them don't. (For the record: if you're a journalist or author using Offbeat Bride as a source of material: it's cool, but please be polite and email me to say hello!)
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Academic Librarian, Copyright Specialist and Tribesmaid Mollyali has written an impressive post on copyright issues and how they relate to your wedding photos. Read on and... Read more
I get it, though: as you point out, Wedinator is part of the Cheezburger network, founders of the ultimate lolcat website, and so of course unsourced photos are par for the course. Because really: who cares who took that photo of a tabby with the words O RLY? So there's a precedent here of them not sourcing photos. As I've mentioned to the Wedinator editors, unsourced photos of cats are one thing … unsourced photos of real people's real weddings feel like a different matter. But it's their site, and they can run it with whatever policies they'd like. It's not my job to police the internet.
Really, this is all an exercise in online etiquette, because here's the deal breaker: I don't own the images that appear on Offbeat Bride. Granted, we make a point to attribute and link all photos we feature on the site — but it's not like they're MY photos.
The copyrights for the photos on Offbeat Bride belong to the photographers, and the wedding stories belong to each bride who submits her wedding to be profiled. Offbeat Bride, like Wedinator, features a lot of user-submitted content, and really the only differences are that A) we make a point to attribute photographers and B) celebrate weddings … while they run A) unsourced work and B) snark about weddings.
Like I said at the start though: ultimately it's a great big internet out there. Wedinator's not my style, so I don't read it … I'd rather spend my time celebrating weird weddings right here.
