How to Fight Back When Your Photo is Stolen—

[Bongo Shrimp]

Kudos for getting your work back. Some people are clueless and really think that if they can find it through a Google image search it's theirs.

 

FYI, it isn't $35 per image. You can send them a jump drive full for the same price.

 

My wife & I are going through the same mess. She shoots weddings among other things and some one stole a bunch of watermarked photos from her site, cropped the WM out and used them as their own.

 

It's $35 per image if you do it image by image online which is my preferred method. More expensive yet less time consuming for me.

[yoshii]

Wow thanks for sharing this Bongo! Very useful information, I'm glad you got your photo back

[dxmaster]

Just for a bit of clarification, its not $35 per image online. I'm a working professional photographer and copyright everything I shoot and it's a $35 charge per upload. Here is a link to a more detailed step-by-step process: http://blog.photoshelter.com/2009/05/elect...ight-registrat/

 

Whenever my images show up somewhere my main goal isn't getting the image removed, its punishing the person who violates the copyright. A well worded DMCA letter to the legitimate host can take down the entire site, not just have an image taken down. If you wish to go further with it, you can sue and pretty much always win as long as you can prove that you copyrighted the image in question.

[nor_cal_nano]

Bongo. Thanks for posting this my man. For ***** and gigs I decided to run some of mine.

 

Apparently this guy likes my tank enough to use it as his avatar... LMAO. In this case, it's just funny and flattering, but if it was a business I'd be pretty ticked.

 

http://www.pojo.biz/board/showthread.php?t=1054768

[dxmaster]

Oh and if you want a fun and easy way to find out if your images are being used online somewhere check out this link: http://jarred.github.com/src-img/

 

Drag the link to your bookmark bar in a modern browser then click it. It'll put a box with two question marks over any image on a page, click that and it will do a google image search for that specific image.

[aaron1987]

The hell is wrong with people on NR these days? Who gives a #### why he did it. His photo, his prerogative and using unlicensed photography for commercial gain is ####ty.

[metrokat]

4. I own the copyright for this image and can sue for damages. For this a lawyer is necessary.

Speaking from experience, by the time you prove damages you're 30K in lawyers fees to get to summary judgement phase. To prove damages would require showing that you sell your images for profit and that the unauthorized user of your image caused you losses, you would need witnesses, like a company saying I was going to pay Bongo $50 for that image but I got it for $0 or $1 from xyz. Witnesses = depositions.

 

A cease and desist letter works like a charm.

 

So 5 companies were using my company brand name in some way or form on Facebook and Pinterest. I prevaled in all instances, those companies pages are no longer searchable fromt he US on those websites. No lawyer, just filled out a form.

[Bongo Shrimp]

Ok if I'm wrong about the price for submitting images online, I'm wrong. I thank you for pointing it out and it will surely save me some money. As for the whole lawyer thing, the whole point of me posting this is to show people that you DON'T need a lawyer and don't have to spend all that money. Yeah this method won't get you damages but is still gets people to take down the pics and shows them what for if the web host gets involved.

 

As for people using my pics for avatars, that's ok. I have found people doing that before but since its not for money or anything I just see it as "oh cool someone likes my pics".

[TeflonTomDosh]