Earlier this year, Justin asked whether I'd be interested in popping over to Denver to ride wingman on his first century. I was giddy to take my recently assembled travel bike on a trip and agreed. This particular ride has an excess of riders and plenty of climbing from the start — and interesting combination for the first twenty or so miles. The descents struck me as piddly until late in the ride when we hit a long, fast section of road headed back towards Castle Rock. It was a sufficiently fun ride that I imagine that we'll do it again next year.

One thing that struck me odd was the copyright details for purchased photos. I'm prone to buying digital copies of photos that don't emphasize my mid-life paunch for use in my digital scrapbook here and over at flickr. Given the default copyright, should I purchase a digital copy from the professional photographer's e-commerce site, I wasn't allowed to use it for much of anything — certainly not here. After a couple rounds of emails, I got in touch with Hunter Mooneyham and explained my intended uses. He willingly extended my rights to the digital photo, which was trés cool from my perspective.

Much cooler would have been an e-commerce/copyright infrastructure that acknowledges the twenty-first century, blogs, photo sharing, social media, jet cars, etc. I doubt that any of this is Mr. Mooneyham's fault — he was very accommodating via email. It was, however, an email conversation that wouldn't have been necessary if the folks writing the small print spent any time considering how their customers would likely use a digital image, here, in the future, where we live now, rather than, y'know, copying and pasting Olan Mills circa 1932 boilerplate into their web forms.