Déjà vu

Last week, on the workshop in Bonn, I was in for a nasty surprise. Sitting there, listening to one talk after the other about black holes, I saw pictures reappear that I had made. Four different pictures of mine, in four different talks. All without picture credits. When I told the speakers later that they've been using a picture that took me in some cases hours to make without even putting my name below it, they apologized. One shrugged shoulders and said "It came up in Google." I checked that, it did come up when doing a Google image source for "Black Hole Evaporation," the source being my home page. I'm not surprised by this, my homepage has always been well indexed by Google. Apparently I was expecting too much when thinking people could at least look at the front page and find my name.I will admit that I am very dismayed by this. Yes, I too sometimes do use other people's figures and plots in my talks, but I usually add a source, if possible to find. It's more complicated with photos, who will typically appear in so many copies on some dozen websites that it's next to impossible to find out who originally took the photo. In any case, some of the pictures I saw reappearing in those talks I don't even hold the copyright on. They were published in one of my papers, and with that the copyright went to the publisher.I don't mind at all if people use my pictures, otherwise I wouldn't upload them to my website. I receive the occasional email from somebody asking if they can use one or the other for a talk or a paper and I always say yes. (I once was asked fo...