Easy stealing during DIGITAL ERA !

Easy stealing during DIGITAL ERA

During the film era, there was not that many cases about stealing images compare to our new era of digital photography.

These days the crooked people under the good name of Pro-Photographer could steal any images thru internet very easily. Then they could change them little bit and present them as their own hard work to few fools.

I DO have a proof.

I managed to caught a thief during my daily critic/comment writing among images. [(K=37501) on 3/3/2006]

Then I managed the spot this.

http://www.usefilm.com/Photo_Forum/11/1012217/

Now examine those images for yourself and judge if I am right in my reason.

Good luck.

Looks like the same girl to me. I think this is one of the main threats of the orphan works law. Items of unidentified images can be combined to make another image legally. A good reason to copyright all images and ensure a watermark is on our posted images. Still not real protection, but at least will allow us to recover damages if our images are stolen.

During the film era no one saw each others images either so it kind of negates that benefit.

Sure digital makes image theft possible but image theft is not new. I have had stock agencies not be completely honest in my payment of images. I have had clients use images in more ways or in more copies than originally purchased. With digital I experienced some of the same and many cases of unauthorized uses, hot linking ect... In the film days there were people who did not deal fair and unless you open a magazine and see you image in an ad that you were not paid for you just did not know. It was hard to catch but it did happen to me. I am not saying improper use it did/does not make me mad it did/does. I realized I was wasting productive time that I could utilize in more profitable ways than chasing down the few unscrupulous individuals.

I believe there are many more honest people than dishonest, always was and always will be. It was the honest people I choose to deal with to pay my bills and did my best to safeguard my images so I did not help the dishonest pay their bills.

I use the Shutterpoint stock site. Its good looking and easy to use -- not a pro site but it suits me -- I've made a few sales there.

My most popular image -- a shot of the NY skyline before 9/11 (~ 1987) is repeatedly comped. But it has never sold. I had a $150.00 price on it and now I've reduced it to $60. Still the same action. I have to believe that some of the comps are stealing.

But as Richard says if I take the photo down to protect it no one will see it!

I should probably try a better stock site, eh?

Frank

re: I have to believe that some of the comps are stealing.

Of course they are. Enforcement of image stealing is shaky-at-best. Why ? THERE ARE NO STANDARDS.
The digital world needs a standard method of detecting stolen images.
key word: STANDARD.

It sure doesn't help that Google sends out robot software to scour people's web sites for images and then makes them freely available to image searches!

You can put some code in your robots.txt on your web site host to stop Google at least.

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /