say WHAT??,originally uploaded by _rebekka.
IT HAPPENED AGAIN!!!
I had already reported the stolen of some of my online images, David Hobby from Strobist noticed one of his photo as an advertisement add with no copyright earnings or even a contact from the editor of the publication.
originally uploaded by strobist. As per David words "My, what a surprise! No credit, no notice, no anything. Just the "honor" of being an ad in their magazine.
And the editor did not even understand why I was a little upset... "
Follow this Flickr thread in here.
Now it's Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir with a 25 horses images stolen from her personal gallery and added to iStockphoto.
_rebekka is one of Flickr's most popular users, she is out with a photo post today of a screenshot where some user named vulcanacar is selling some of her photos on iStockphoto you can view, read and participate at her Flickr thread in here.
"I thought I'd bring this to light as a warning and wake up call to folks. I'm not putting the blame with iStockphoto per se, but still, this is a problem that is becoming increasingly annoying, for everyone that uses the internet to showcase work. I mean for crying out loud, out of 31 images this particular user has on his "portfolio" , 25 of them are mine, and at least 3 are of me..
I have contacted a copyright lawyer about this, and will be doing what i can to tackle this problem in the best way possible, (please, nobody start sending any angry letters or anything of that sort, this needs to be dealt with in a level-headed way) but i wanted to tell people about this as well, because this is always happening, and your photos could be on there illegally as well. You never know."
The images were also used to promote another website as per mentioned on the iStockphoto forum here with the following comment:
"I just launched a website for a client (www.thegifthorse.us) and I used several photos on the home page (in random format). Thanks for an awesome selection! We couldn't choose just one, so we used them all!".
iStockphoto of course is owned by Getty Images, the largest provider of stock photography in the world. It will be interesting to see how their lawyers handle this one.
And here we are buying a lot of lenses, improving our cameras and skills only to be ripped off by some guy who maybe doesn't even know how to take a picture.
This pxxxxx me off!!!
Hope this could come to a good term and that the vulcanacar user be paying by his mistakes so that people start to understand that someone else's pictures are not FREE domain to grab and use as they please and for their own usage and profit.
As I like to give new Ideas and help people out with their photography situations I DO CONDEMN THE PEOPLE WHO DOES THIS KIND OF THINGS TO OTHERS!!!!
So I could not leave this open and unspoken on my blog.
Feel free to copy and distribute all or part of this blog message and contribute to the "Expose Fraud Cases" cause.
Use the comments to expose some situations that you have had and help others not falling on the same mistakes.
THANK YOU!!
6 comments:
He, I'd just love to be the one being 'ripped off' - after reading Dan Hellers blog about foto copyright this time I won't just nicely say 'these are my pictures' but instead get a good lawyer and see what the stuff is worth.
Holy CR*P!
That is just so wrong, so, so wrong. I can't even imagine... I've always been wary of posting hi rez images online for this very reason but it makes me wonder if anyone has done the same to me. Thankfully, I'm not a big flickr user (for this very reason) - I don't think that I'll be uploading anything other than 640x480 images from now on!
Very disturbing news. How did you or Rebecca even discover your images had been hijacked? What can one do to learn if and where their images are being used without permission?
Was this just by chance that you learned of one of our images being 'stolen'?
Hi Gregg,
I normally do a Google search by some of the items I have on my online photos as well as my ID name other times friends alerted me for the photos.
I think that there is no way you can know this unless you dig on the web and make sure your photos always have a watermark when you publish them and do not make them larger than 72dpi.
These are preventive measures and could not mean that your photo would not be stolen and photoshoped later on.
Prevent is a better method for now.
another trick is to make sure you add metadata to the file, then you can search for the photo by those words, I have also seen a link somewhere that traces who is using your photos from flickr and other sites, just dont remember where I saw that link.
KE
http://photobusinessforum.blogspot.com/2008/06/orphan-works-unique-set-of-myths-and.html
READ these, people ( there are links to other parts of the story, at the bottom of that story, before the Comments )
it does matter, to many people's livelihoods, and to our liability, as well.
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