"I Stole Your Photos"

<p>He wants to sue you if you don't let him steal your photos. This is the ultimate gall.... </p>

<p><a href="http://www.kottke.org/09/06/it-took-him-a-long-time-to-find-images-he-liked">http://www.kottke.org/09/06/it-took-him-a-long-time-to-find-images-he-liked</a></p>

 

<p>If true (and why wouldn't it be? it's plausible enough) it would seem to scream out for a letter from the photographer's lawyer asking for payment for the images used.</p>

<p>This is either a hoax or this guy is quite dumb (or just shameless)... "I am a honest business man"..."Small business never gets respect"?... please, how about the photographer?..... maybe where he lives this sortf of stuff is "legal"?</p>

<p>No way! LOL!</p>

<p>A few years ago, I foudn that an Italian website linked to a lighthouse photo from my website. I don't remember the URL now. Anyhow I no longer have that image on my website. I wonder what is happening now. The image was featured on their index page.</p>

<p>Had a moron on ebay steal one of my photos. So I sent him an invoice via paypal. He siad that since Ionly had my copyright notice on the site and not the photo he can take it, 'thats the law' he said, but then on another photo there WAS a copyright ON the photo - but he still used that one too...so not sure what he is thinking.</p>

<p>Not only did he take the photo he hotlinked to my site which is how i found out. The other photo he used I knew the photographer so I conacted him to let him know - he sent the guy an invoice too :P</p>

<p>Wow... so not only is this person claiming to be leaching the poor photographer's bandwidth, but also using thier photos without rights.<br /> <br /> IF this is real, its pretty funny that someone could actually be that dumb. If its a hoax, its still pretty funny.<br /> <br /> If it was me, I'd put some "other" images back w/ the same names so they'd pop up on this person's website.... LOL Catz comes to mind.</p>

<p>On one occasion when I asked someone to remove one of my images from their web site, I had a moderately abusive email back saying he was going to use the image and to call a lawyer if I wanted to do anything about it.<br>

The advice I received was to treat it as a case of using a service and refusing to pay for it, so I told the gentleman involved that unless he paid for the image or removed it, I would be in contact with a local debt collecting agency.<br>

The image went.<br>

Other's milage may vary</p>

<p>When I find one of my images actually linked to and not credited I simply replace the image with one with a really big and ugly watermark right over it stating my copyright. Obviously if they steal the image itself that won't work, though. <br>

<a href="http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php?t=520246&page=29&pp=1">EXAMPLE</a></p>

 

<p>If you're a bit technical and you have the right access to your webserver, you can arrange for external links directly to one of images to show a different picture to internal links from your own pages - the webserver uses the referrer field that the browser sends to tell the context in which the picture is displayed.</p>

<p>So you can have a "linking to this image is not permitted" automatically shown if your image is linked on another page. Or a picture of a pair of naked buttocks. Or something worse.</p>

<p>Nice one DN and Alec. I didn't know that about arranging for "linking to this image not permitted".</p>

<p>I don't have anything insightful to say (which means I am probably breaking a Pnet code), but I <em>had</em> to add that that email was one of the funniest things I have ever read. Ever.</p>

<p>Idiot - if he calls his lawyer, you have this email. ROFL - oh, wow. Even if this isn't true, it is still funny, and quite frankly, probably is true somewhere.</p>

<p>I heard this same story over a year ago, but it's still funny. I'd be inclined to do what Alec suggests...</p>

Why not alter the name of the original file, and in the old filename, make a text: "I stole a photo from...."

 

The delinquent would then display the text on his personal site, and it might go some time before he sees it. Wonder whether he would get any new business?

<p>That's something that is more annoying that people using your photos. When you confront them about it, their response is "so?" And you can threaten legal action, but most of us are the little guy, we don't have our lawyer that we can afford to send after everyone that uses our image. So we can do these little things like replaceing the URL with a picture of my bare hairy backside, but you're not going to actually get anything out of it. Except for the laugh of, well, my bare hairy backside on someone's website.</p>

<p>LOL. My example in the prior post has been modified to use an image from B&H Photo rather than the one that had been there from my website. Apparently a moderator on that site assisted as my referring post (that included the image from my website) has also been changed.</p>