It's a small world

Thanksgiving day morning, I received an email from the Copyright Editor of the South Australian Certificate of Education (SACE) requesting that I forward an attached copyright permission request to Margie Mitchell, whom faithful readers will recognize as the Beach Coordinator for the City of Cocoa Beach.

The SACE folks wanted permission to use Margie's picture of a purple sea snail published in this blog March 25, 2009. SACE had used the photo in their 2010 Year 12 examination paper for Specialist Mathmatics as the basis of this question - "As the purple sea snail (Janthina janthina) grows, the lateral dimensions of its shell can be modelled by the differential system" .... (followed by a bunch of stuff involving x's and y's that I will not even pretend to understand). The picture in the exam was provided with full credit to Margie and this blog. Now the exam will apparently be made available to the public, so copyright permission was being requested.

I loved the fact that the SACE went to such meticulous detail to do the right thing - certainly the likelihood of discovery had they simply used the photo with no attribution and no permission is slim. But their four-page permission form included illustration of how the photo was used in the exam and a replication of the applicable portion of the blog post and our Copyright Notice.

Margie, of course, immediately provided SACE with permission (by email rather than snail mail - tee hee). And we both marveled at the chances of somebody in Australia finding Margie's photo of a little purple critter posted 18 months ago and using it as the basis of a math question!

As Disney would say, it's a small, small world!

(Photo by Margie Mitchell)