Not to reopen recent discussion, simply to post something you may find useful.
Are you aware of the DMCA? The Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This places an obligation on the user of an image on the web to observe copyright, this includes website owners, web service providers, and also the search engines that link to a site eg Google.
I recently discovered a blatant use of one of my images, scanned out of a book and used to sell music on a web site. The picture was used over 300 times. I emailed the site owner using several different addresses she has, and was ignored and eventually placed in her stop list so my emails got bounced back. It was obvious she did not want to play ball. Cost of legal action started at $2000 and would have spiralled.
Although I am in the UK, and the offending site is in the USA, I invoked the DMCA, wrote to the offenders hosting service and Google, sending sufficient proof of my claim. Google are obliged to remove ALL web links to offending site pages and will only reinstate them if the user proves they have the right to use the contested image.
The hosting service contacted the offender within two weeks and demanded that she send them written confirmation of her right to use the images or they would shut her site down. She removed the images immediately.
Google then followed it up and would have severed ALL search engine links and references to her pages but she had already removed the images.
Do I get compensated for my time and effort. No. But I did give someone in another country who was stealing from me a fright.
The DMCA is a controversial piece of legislation as it is open to serious abuse, and has been hotly debated with regard to its serious 'freedom of speech' implications. There's a lot of stuff on the web about it and a search on DMCA will turn up plenty.
For a pile of info from the US Gov:
www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf
See also the anti-DMCA and EFF sites for another view:
And to add to this - you can use this software http://tineye.com/ to find your images being used online - its still beta software so no idea how good it will become, but the idea seems sound.
Just to add to what John mentions above - it'd be wise for everyone who puts images on the web (either here or on their websites) to put a text copyright on the image, and also to populate the image metadata with copyright & contact details - eg e-mail & web address.
While these can be cropped and stripped from images, it will help show it was your image and that you didn't just give it away - ie that someone has had to intentionally remove a copyright, or strip the metadata out and that it wasn't just 'accidental'.
In light of attempts to bring in orphan works legislation on both sides of the Atlantic, putting your name and contact details on your work will become more important in the future.
Posted by Major Gilbert on December 3, 2008 at 3:02 PM
I agree to a certain extent with Nicks comments, but my metadata contains all my personal info, address, phone number, camera serial number, when/where taken etc, information not freely in the public domain, so i always use the "save for web" which strips it all out. If all the info was there, someone stealing an image, could then give all my details to anyone querying it, giving the impression it was all above board.
You choose what info you include - so there's nothing that says you must include your snail-mail address. Simply include name, e-mail, website address and a mobile number.
The point is that, if you ever have to, you can prove that someone has intentionally removed the information. ie their intent was to deprive you of the moral right to be known as the creator of the work ... and hence to deprive you of the receipt of income from your creation.
You cannot prove someone intentionally removed the information.
There is absolutely no guarantee that the person using your image is the person who stripped the metadata. Once your image is off and out there circulating with no data in it you can prove very little against the end user if they claim it was found eg in some photo-sharing site (of which there are dozens if not hundreds) with a copyright-free tag on it.
Shooting RAW and retaining the original is a good starting point if you do want to chase someone and prove your ownership - which might be worth doing against a major company, or a hosting site.
However its debatable whether you are being deprived of income anyway with most illegal usage as most people using images in this way do so because they dont want to pay anyone.
Discussion
7 repliesAre you aware of the DMCA? The Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This places an obligation on the user of an image on the web to observe copyright, this includes website owners, web service providers, and also the search engines that link to a site eg Google.
I recently discovered a blatant use of one of my images, scanned out of a book and used to sell music on a web site. The picture was used over 300 times. I emailed the site owner using several different addresses she has, and was ignored and eventually placed in her stop list so my emails got bounced back. It was obvious she did not want to play ball. Cost of legal action started at $2000 and would have spiralled.
Although I am in the UK, and the offending site is in the USA, I invoked the DMCA, wrote to the offenders hosting service and Google, sending sufficient proof of my claim. Google are obliged to remove ALL web links to offending site pages and will only reinstate them if the user proves they have the right to use the contested image.
The hosting service contacted the offender within two weeks and demanded that she send them written confirmation of her right to use the images or they would shut her site down. She removed the images immediately.
Google then followed it up and would have severed ALL search engine links and references to her pages but she had already removed the images.
Do I get compensated for my time and effort. No. But I did give someone in another country who was stealing from me a fright.
The DMCA is a controversial piece of legislation as it is open to serious abuse, and has been hotly debated with regard to its serious 'freedom of speech' implications. There's a lot of stuff on the web about it and a search on DMCA will turn up plenty.
For a pile of info from the US Gov:
www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf
See also the anti-DMCA and EFF sites for another view:
http://www.anti-dmca.org/
http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/20030102_dmca_unintended_consequences.html
You can read Google's obligations to you here:
www.google.com/dmca.html
It is a serious piece of legislation, with implications for all of us.
While these can be cropped and stripped from images, it will help show it was your image and that you didn't just give it away - ie that someone has had to intentionally remove a copyright, or strip the metadata out and that it wasn't just 'accidental'.
In light of attempts to bring in orphan works legislation on both sides of the Atlantic, putting your name and contact details on your work will become more important in the future.
Major.
The point is that, if you ever have to, you can prove that someone has intentionally removed the information. ie their intent was to deprive you of the moral right to be known as the creator of the work ... and hence to deprive you of the receipt of income from your creation.
There is absolutely no guarantee that the person using your image is the person who stripped the metadata. Once your image is off and out there circulating with no data in it you can prove very little against the end user if they claim it was found eg in some photo-sharing site (of which there are dozens if not hundreds) with a copyright-free tag on it.
Shooting RAW and retaining the original is a good starting point if you do want to chase someone and prove your ownership - which might be worth doing against a major company, or a hosting site.
However its debatable whether you are being deprived of income anyway with most illegal usage as most people using images in this way do so because they dont want to pay anyone.