Alerting photographers of site selling images without authorization.

08-18-2018

To both fellow artist and photographers,

I was alerted by a person that my images were possibly being used on a site without my permission. I investigated the claim and turns out it was true. I immediately wrote a cease and desist email to the offending site. I also made contact with their hosting site Shopify who express a strong belief that copyrights should be protected. I lodged a complaint and got immediate positive results. It is our intellectual property that is being taken advantage of and we need to shut down these sites. Shopify has a repeated offense policy that will shut down any of it's client's site(s) if they continually repeat and violate the rules. I strongly urge fellow photographers and artist to make their own personal investigation into the possible usage of your images. They have over 365 pages containing over 4,380 of some incredible photos's and art. The art may be small images, I'm guessing they are possibly enlarging the images through an interpolation algorithm using a photo editing program. It's not as good as the larger original size but enough to make them big enough to do what they are doing and get away with it.

Email I received from representative of offending site:

Dear friend,

I am sorry about that. We used the photo on google, we don't know who is the owner. it is the reason why did not ask for permission.

We removed it now.

Pls rest assured.

Have a great day! I'm looking forward to our next interaction in the future. We are always here to help you. Thank you very much!

Best regards,

Helen.

Offending site is Monkstars.com:

Monkstars

I would like to acknowledge the fast expeditious results of Shopify's team for enforicng their policy. I am thankful for their cooperation.

We work together we can shut down Mokstars. Please post and alert other photo and art sites, share with your friends.

Regards,

Paul

One major problem is Google and others strip all Metadata from images they put up for folks to find on their search engines. Without the information someone who wants to make contact can't do so - they don't know who the Photographer/Owner/Poster is.

Google has been to court and won the right to use the images in their search programs. They need to be taken to court again for stripping metadata - as US Copyright laws do take away defenses when one removes Copyright information. The only way they will change their operation is if someone hits them in the bank account.