Image Theft?

Don't know if you've seen the recent post in the General Discussion regarding images posted on Pixdaus.com. I went there to see what might be up there and I saw many photos by NPNers including some RMNP photogs including:

Morris McClung
Todd Caudle
Stan Rose
Stephen Weaver
Jeff Hackett
Grant Collier
Jack Brauer
Dan Walters
George Stocking
Bill Meikle

Don't know if this angers you or if you're OK with it but just thought I would let you know.

I am not sure that all, or any are stolen. For example, looking at Stan's images you can see that there is a discussion in the comments section between him (edit: I should say the poster as I can not confirm Stan was commenting) and other viewers. It appears that a viewer doesn't believe the flower and dunes image is real and is instead claiming that it is photoshop art. I guess some folks prefer to stay home and watch t.v. instead of seeing what is really out there.

S

Honestly, I'm surprised by the angry reaction. Well actually, maybe not. There's a lot of legit thievery on the net, so I understand the typical photographer's reaction. But when you think about what's really going on, isn't this at least somewhat good for a photographer? Getting your work seen by more people? This person isn't claiming the images as her own. In fact, she took the time to add full credit info. And there's no possibility of personal gain (at least $$$), with a free photo sharing website like this. Get a good photo on Pixdaus, watch it become popular, and I'd call it free marketing. Good grief, I can't believe the angry reaction she's getting. Seriously, thank God for the state of current technology that allows for such free publicity. "Poppy", you can use my credited photos.

Sure, legally this violates the standard copyright notice we all use - about saving, copying, posting photos elsewhere. Guess this is one of those cases where you get your panties in a bunch, or you don't and move on with life.

Get used to this type of thing, or take your photos off the net. Or use big fat ugly copyright credits in the center of your photo - if this really bothers you. It's what the stock companies do, for good reason. If you don't, expect this sort of thing to happen. Photographers have to take most of the blame here - when there are available means to protect your work.

Rant finished.

On a related note, something interesting I've learned ... editors, art consultants and others who might like to buy your images for commercial use HATE having to deal with big fat copyrights stamped in photographs. In fact, some have told me that they just move on if they see the big ugly credits. These people use your website JPEGs for comps/proposals. Just food for thought.

Jesse, your views was the conclusion I came to after finding some of my stuff on vi.zualize.us, stumbleupon, and pixdaus a couple of weeks ago. My biggest complaint was some weird text in the lower right corner of one image that claimed some sort of ownership. The name of the original image had also been given a colorful new title "Jungle river" when it was taken in Texas! I wrote the site moderator and he quickly changed the image to a proper one with my copyright and gave it it's true name and a link to my website. Bingo...free advertising and big leap in website traffic.

Interesting comments. As long as the poster gives appropriate credit and does not try to profit from, or claim credit for, someone else's work, I don't see a problem with it. Cross that line and its a different story. I was actually kinda disappointed that none of my images appear there!

Jesse, I'm interested in how big is "too big" for credits in photographs? I'm currently building a new website and I was debating whether or not to add a credit to my photos and if so, what size and what placement. In looking at many other photographer's websites I noticed that it is generally more common for photos to have NO credit at all which really surprised me. I've always thought that it would be prudent to have at least a small, but legible, credit along the edge of a photo but seeing so many photographers opt for no credit at all has me rethinking this. Of course its easy enough to just crop the credit off so maybe adding one is pointless. Perhaps the copyright in the metadata is enough? Thoughts?

As long as the poster gives appropriate credit and does not try to profit from, or claim credit for, someone else's work, I don't see a problem with it.

Well, there is a problem with it, in that if someone uses someone else's photo without permission, that's wrong. BUT, on the scale of things, it's not worth getting too worked up over. Sort of echoing Jesse's thoughts, I decided a long time ago that I had two options: Either put photos on the Web, knowing full well that they're gonna get kyped, or don't put photos on the Web. I chose the former.

HaHa, yeah me too Phillip! Why didn't you steal mine?!

I'm redoing my website too, and am not using anything on my photos. I currently using just my signature, but it really doesn't do anything - other than provide a little "artsy" look.

When it comes down to it, to have something to hold up in court - you'd have to have a very identifiable copyright mark visible in your image. This overcomes the typical argument, that the thief didn't know whose work it was. Metadata can be stripped. Of course, this all assumes that you've run into a massive problem with someone stealing your work and gaining from it - and you have to do something about it. Honestly, I don't know how likely something like this is, and I don't worry about it anymore. I'd rather have my clients, who provide the bulk of my income, have an easier time of using my work. But there's no questioning that a simple credit line or watermark (like the stock websites use) is the only foolproof way to completely avoid this issue.

Too big? Dunno. But I personally like the way Michael Gordon does it.

http://www.michael-gordon.com/photo.php?id=36&gallery=desert

Big enough to read easily, harder to crop out, unquestionable ownership, means of contacting the artist, but still subtle.

I've always thought it interesting that Marc Adamus doesn't put anything visible on his stuff. He may very well have some elaborate traceable electronic watermark invisible to the eye...who knows except him?

This one doesn't bother me too much since they did include my credits, though I am disappointed that there's no link to my site.

I get a large chunk of web traffic from Stumbleupon (or similar sites), whose users hotlink my images, but thankfully include the links. For this reason I do not disable hotlinking on my website.

There's one site similar to Pixdaus that compiles and rates popular photos around the web, and I discovered that a couple of my photos were in the top ten, but there was no link to my site. I emailed the site owner, and tactfully requested that he link those images to my website, which he did, and that funneled thousands of hits to my site for several years.

One thing that does bother me is when people submit my photos as their own, or on sites like Flickr where it is implied that the photos belong to the poster. In this case I usually leave a comment under the photo stating that it's mine, it's used without permission, and then I post the link to the photo on my website.

A couple times I've even had people submit my images for photo contests, as their own! More laughable still, they didn't even bother to photoshop out my copyright credits! When I reported those, the users were banned from the sites.

For all these reasons I think is is VERY important to include some kind of copyright watermark on the image itself. I make it very small and subtle in the corner, but just so long as it's there is the main thing. This ensures that no matter where the images go around the web, having long lost their credits, people still know who took the photo and can easily find me with a quick google search.

Here's an interesting article on this subject. This photographers suggests that you can actually use these "stolen" photos for marketing through the use of effective watermarking.

I don't know if it's better to not to have your pictures taken there, or to have some taken there like me, and not get a single comment. As has been said, "to post or not to post, that is the question." On my website I have a right click disable command, so they really have to work to get the image, but it's not completely secure. For now I will keep posting and enjoy some free advertising, I guess. As long as they give me credit for the picture. If the do not, "I will hunt them down and gut them like a fish!"

Morris - I hate to tell you, but your right-click-disable only works in IE. I had no problem right-clicking and copying images from your site using Firefox.

Well, thanks for telling everyone!
As I said, not all that secure really. Shame on Firefox for not obeying my commands.
Thanks for letting me know, Brent.

Remember, we all have inherent copyright rights that we can enforce just by being the producer of the piece. However, if you ever want to claim damages and recover any money through a court action, you need to have your images registered with the copyright office. Kind of a pain, but it may be worthwhile if anyone really did you wrong. This is something on my todo list, but I'm not too worried ... yet.

Thanks for the heads up on this. I have found a lot of people stealing my images over the years, and it's very rare they'll attribute them to me, so this instance is not as bad as most. A few years ago, my images started turning up at the top of the Google search results and I'd get 1000+ visitors a day just looking for images (it's since fallen off some). This didn't seem to turn into many sales, but it turned into a lot of image theft. So while having an occasional image stolen may not be a big deal, I realized it was becoming a problem for me. In particular, I really try to go after those using my images on commercial sites, especially since it's unfair to others who have paid me to use the images on their sites. I once found my stolen image on a semi-commercial site and told them to remove it or pay me $150. To my surprise, they paid the $150.

Morris (and others interested), I have a code on my site that prevents right-clicking on IE and Firefox. You're welcome to view my source code and use whatever you like. I also have a code that prevents clicking and dragging an image onto the desktop from Firefox and one that prevents the image toolbar from popping up in IE. And I have one that prevents Google and other image searches from opening my images in frames and then letting people open the image directly, outside of my web site. I also prevent hotlinking of my images via an .htaccess file (except for trusted sites that I list). I'd estimate that these things have cut down image theft by 95% or more, as I now find far fewer of my images out there and some I do find may have been there a while. Most people just think they can use any image they find on the web, and simply giving a warning when they attempt to right-click will deter them from intentionally bypassing the disabled right-click. There's actually also a way to encrypt your source code so people can't find the URL to open your images directly. But search engines also won't find your images, so I didn't do that. And for a while there was a way to disable alt-printscreen on IE when your web site was open, but I think IE fixed that glitch. I do put a copyright logo on the center of my images for my stock site since there's 4000+ photos there, but not for my "gallery" site with 300 photos.

Having your images out there might be good publicity on occasion, but that doesn't mean I think people should have any right to take your images w/out asking. Stealing music off the web and playing it loud may give publicity for a song, but that doesn't mean the music execs will be happy. I think photographers should approach this with the same business-mindset. If you want your images out there, it's probably best to specifically state that people can use your images in exchange for a link back to your site.

Keep in mind that the disable of the right click is just a deterrent but it is still possible to grab the image from your page with just one extra step, or two if it is a flash site. As soon as you placed your image on the web you opened yourself up for usage violations. You could use a company like PicScout to track down usage, but even they don't look for all the kids stealing stuff since it is going to make them any money when they attempt to collect damages for you. As stated previously in this thread you should be aware of filing a copyright registration for all your images which is now done online.

The one thing that amazes me is how many people on this forum don't have their metadata included with the image they are posting on the web, essentially making it an orphan work at that time. I just quickly looked at some data and see that Erik and Jack are doing a good job.

While we are having this discussion about images, I always find it ironic many photographers complain about images being stolen from their site but yet they are using music on the website which they may not have the license to use in a commercial manner. I don't know if anyone on here falls into that category, but I have seen it often with wedding and portrait photographers.

There are days when I just wish my images were nice enough that someone would even consider grabbing them off the internet.

Adding metadata is fairly simple, so realisticlly I should probably do it. But for me, the problem with both registering copyrights and embedding metadata is that it will probably only come in handy if you have to file a lawsuit to establish that the images are yours and collect money for them. I can't imagine ever getting to the point of suing over a little 600-pixel image (the story, of course, might be different for a hi-res image). So while it may be sound legal advice, I just don't see it being that practical for images on the web. My first priority is to prevent people from taking the images in the first place. Disabling right click, etc. is far from foolproof but it works because the majority of people stealing images aren't doing so maliciously. They simply think there's no problem with taking the images available on the web and the photographer won't mind. So having a message pop-up when they right-click telling them saving images is not allowed will deter the vast majority of people. I sort of wish more photographers, and maybe even NPN, would do this because it would help get the word out that images on the web are not a free-for-all and maybe even build up a better market for selling images for web use. It's also very simple to add this code to your web site and much easier than tracking down stolen images after the fact.

As for music, I agree that photographers and others should abide by those copyrights as well. For my photography videos, I use archive.org to find 1000s of recordings that are part of public domain or distributed free of charge with attribution. Okay, that will hopefully be the last of my rantings!

Metadata can easily be rendered useless. It can be stripped or overwritten. But this "flaw" is not a big deal, as you have other means of protecting your rights. It's just not that important in the grand scheme of things. The path to peace of mind here is to send a cd of JPEGs to be registered at the copyright office. But like Grant said, you're not likely to reach the point of needing registration records over a JPEG file.

There are other reasons to use metadata. It can be nice to provide it for those who are specifically looking for the photo information (editors, etc.) ... or for those who use it for database integration (as is the case with Jack's website software).

Should you include metadata? No reason not to, if you're so inclined. Some abusers won't have a clue what metadata is, and you'll catch them with their pants down. Just my opinion.

IMO the best thing you can do is put an awful looking PROOF or ©myphoto on your images.
PrtScn or PrtSc copy-paste into PS is the easiest way to get images off the web.... this info brought to my attention by Neil. Just another thing to worry about! Yikes!




Furthermore.....statistically how often does this happen? sorry I just wrapped up an advanced stats course, so at the 95% confidence level I can say that image theft is rare given the null hypothesis is true....don't ask just laugh

While it is easy to wipe off metadata, having it on a web image from the beginning helps in the aspect of orphan works which was a hot topic last year and will probably be discussed once again in Washington this year. It is not if orphan works legislation will take place, but when it will happen and what will be included in the bill. I won't go to far into that now, since we are more so talking about just flat out stealing and not the implications of orphan works.

Has anyone used steganography for embedding a copyright? I'm sure it doesn't qualify as a prominent copyright notice since it's invisible, but it would be a way of proving a photo was yours - sort of like engraving your SSN on the inside of an expensive stereo amp.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

http://www.jjtc.com/pub/tr_95_11_nfj/index.html

Furthermore.....statistically how often does this happen?

It's been 15 yeas since I had my college stats classes, but I'll give this a go. My null hypothesis (not yet proven) is that 1 in 10,000 visitors to your site will steal fully unprotected images (+ / - 5,000 visitors depending on whether your images are good or whether they suck. ). This is less than one image per year if you get 20 visitors per day. If you get 2,000 visitors per day, that amounts to 73 + / - 36.5 images per year. Alternatively, you can use CAZ's strategy of never letting your images see the light of day. You will then have 0 visitors per day and an image theft just once every infinite number of years.

Thanks for pointing this out Phillip.