Thousands of Photo.net Images Hotlinked to Amazon.com Seller Forum

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<li>I'm a bookseller on Amazon.com and we have Seller Forums similar to the ones here. Primarily we discuss books, selling and shipping concerns along with an Off Topic Soapbox. Recently we've had a odd new Poster, "Coverjock", who has begun a series of what they call "Serenity Threads" where they post hundreds of hotlinked Photo.net images. Credits are never given. The first thread started was deleted by the Moderators because it was so overloaded with Photo.net images it was slowing our Forum down. Before the thread was deleted Coverjock encouraged everyone to copy these images.</li>

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<li>I was a Member here on Photo.net back in the nineties when I was publishing books for the beauty industry. Photo.net sure has changed with the times but I'm pretty sure this practice of hotlinking is still verboten. So I, along with many others, have asked to them stop linking to copyrighted original photographs. I've even posted the Photo.net Terms of Use and DMCA to no avail. Coverjock implies, but has shown no proof, they have permission from Photo.net. and all the Photographers here.</li>

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<li>Anyone can view and post in the Amazon Seller Forums if you would like to see for yourself. You'll see quite a few parodies on these disruptive image threads, but the latest one started by "Coverjock" featuring exclusively Photo.net images is called "SERENITY BRAND NEW! EYE CANDY FOR THE SOULS - PART 2". I'd be happy to give you the proper link to our Forums if that is allowed. Thanks in advance for the opinions of Photo.net users. </li>

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<p>Thanks, RB. It's very sporting of you to pass that along. Sounds like Amazon might get a truckload of DMCA take-down requests. They'll pull "coverjock's" rights in a blink if he or any routine offender keeps it up. I'm not seeing a current thread there that's loaded down with PN images, though... at least not at the moment.</p>

<p>Would you like a link to the actual thread in the Soapbox Forum? I wasn't sure if it's alright to post links in the Photo.net Forums. I just realized I should add that Amazon.com has separate Forums for Buyers and Sellers. These wierd Serentity threads are posted on the Soapbox in the Amazon Seller Community.</p>

<p>This is something I have been aware of for the past couple of weeks and that we have been trying to combat from the backend. However, it is turning out to be a problem that might need the combined power of the PN membership to help us out with.</p>

<p>Let me talk with Jin real quick and see what the story is from his end. We may just have to encourage everyone to file thousands of DCMA complaints with Amazon in order to get their attention.</p>

<p>If anyone wants to check if their images are being misused, the link to the forum thread is:</p>

<p><a href="http://www.amazonsellercommunity.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=165612&tstart=15">http://www.amazonsellercommunity.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=165612&tstart=15</a></p>

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If you want to file a DMCA complaint with Amazon, see the following page:

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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&nodeId=508088#copyright">http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&nodeId=508088#copyright</a>

<p>Thanks for the link, Bob.</p>

<p>I'm shocked to discover 6 images of mine just in the first 10 (of 67) pages! I may have to seriously consider taking down my portfolio, or at least resized or watermarked to the point of being useless as many have done on Pnet.</p>

<p>If anyone signs into the Forums, there is also a REPORT link on each post that goes to our Moderators. When enough people complain the thread is removed and the Poster is banned from using the Amazon Forums. Most of us use the name associated with our Selling account there, but this Coverjock is using an undercover Posting name only that is not connected to their Store.</p>

<p>I think a small copyright noice, something like "<em>Copyright 200X Your name. If you see this image anywhere but on photo.net, it has been stolen. Please report to xxxx@yyyy.com</em>" would be quite effective for images posted here.</p>

<p>Technically I think it should be possible to prohibit hotlinking by a particular website. For most sites running the Apache webserver you can do this via a .htaccess file. I know you can <em>disable</em> hotlinking from all sites except those that you specify. I presume it should also be possible to <em>allow</em> hotlinking from all sites <em>except</em> those you specify. I don't know how easy it is if you're running multiple servers and you're trying to block amazon (which may also be running mutiple servers).</p>

<p>I trust whatever Jin tells me about what can or can't be done regarding this sort of thing. He's the Wiz on photo.net. And nobody beats the Wiz.</p>

<p>Absolutely! I'm sure there are problems when the systems get as large as photo.net and amazon. You have to be careful to only block what you want to block. It's easy to end up with unintended consequences once you start messing with permissions. What works for simple systems may not scale well either, plus having to check each HTTP request for who it comes from and what they are asking for is going to slow the system somewhat. Plus not all systems send properly configured HTTP headers. I'm sure Jin has a good handle on it and if it was possible, he'd find a way to do it.</p>

<p>I'm not sure how good my memory is on this, but I seem to remember some sort of hotlink allow/disallow option for users way back. Maybe it was just something that was talked about and never offered, I don't remember. There have certainly been hotlinking problems before, so the issue has been thought about. Maybe there's even some old hotlinking prevention code burried somewhere is the stuff that Brian wrote for the image database long long ago, though maybe the system has changed so much since then that it wouldn't be applicable anymore (even assuming it's there)

<p>Turning off ALL hotlinking would work too, but that has a downside if some users want to link to their own images from other sites plus there are possible problems with search engines which present thumbnails. In general you wouldn't want to disable ALL hotlinking.</p>

<p>Yeah, in a perfect world PN would have an blacklisted URL table in the database, with wildcard matching. That way an administrative user could cause hotlinking from a known offending target (say, a thread at Amazon, but not all of Amazon) to be blocked. Yes, this would prevent a PN member from posting his own image in that same thread, but <em>only to the extent that the file is hosted at PN</em>, and that's technically naughty, anyway.<br /><br />It should be pretty easy to pre-process the HTTP GET to see if the referrer is inside the PN univerise, and not even pester the script with a blacklist lookup until the URL is external. That would make the vast majority of the image hits happen with hardly any latency. But it would provide for an opportunity to substitute the hotlinked JPGs (at URLs <em>known</em> to be offenders - and those might just be in one little corner of a larger web presence) with a "please visit photo.net" vanilla banner, etc.</p>

<p>Aaargh... "Coverjock" has started up again posting more hotlinks of images from Photo.net. It would be appreciated if someone from here posted a response from Photo.net against the hotlinking. To be honest, I run the risk of being reported myself if I post anymore warnings.</p>

<p>Does it do any good to file a "report" via the link to the left of each message (image)? I just did that on one, citing lack of permissions for all photos posted by that user.</p>

<p>Yes, it does help to report them. Every Report is supposedly read by the Moderators. Quite often though it takes numerous reports for the posts or threads to be deleted. <br>

If would be especially helpful if there was a statement issued from PN in a Post.<br>

That would end the crazy questioning of whether PN is actually instigating these threads in order to build viewers to the PN website for advertising purposes.</p>

<p>I just filed a "report" as well:</p>

<blockquote>

<p>I am the owner of this image. It is used without my permission and violates my copyright. There are 5 other images of mine hijacked by this user. Please address this promptly. <br /> <br /> Kind regards,<br /> <br /> Michael Chang</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I have posted on that thread, though I do not expect that it will do much good.</p>

<p>If you search the "seller soapbox" subforum using search terms like "permission" or "copyright", there are MANY complaining messages about this clown coverjock. Seems like the so-called moderator there is asleep. He or she must have a supervisor somewhere in Amazon.com who could be contacted (by an attorney?). It's not clear to me what coverjock's purpose is in posting photos, with or without permission.</p>

<p>Folks,</p>

<p>I'm working on this as quickly as I can. I believe I may be on the path to getting it taken care of. Thanks for your patience.</p>

<p>I filed a report too.</p>

<p>Their moderator does appear to be asleep at the wheel. Something like this would have been caught and removed in minutes if it had appeared on any photo.net forum.</p>

<p>If you have an interest (i.e. if one or your images has been posted), email to copyright@amazon.com couldn't hurt.</p>

<p>Wondering why people do things is probably pointless. They do them because they can. In this case I assume someone wrote a script to do the posting. I can't imagine anyone doing it by hand, one image at a time.</p>

<p>Please hold off on the email for an hour or so and let me see if my "back-channel" solution yields any results. If it doesn't, then I'm going to rally the troops and we can all flood the amazon DMCA with complaints.</p>

<p><img src="file:///C:/DOCUME~1/ALLARD~1/LOCALS~1/Temp/moz-screenshot.jpg" alt="" /> <em>I can't imagine anyone doing it by hand, one image at a time.</em><br>

Well, reading some of the text in between the images that this coverjock posts I would not be surprised. I very much doubt any of my images is in there, but is there an easier way to check except going through all 69 pages?</p>

<p>You guys need a copyright lawyer! As long as your system(photonet) is set up so that thousands of images can be downloaded without the permission of the owner(s), no one is going to voluntarily stop doing it. Also , for those "members of photonet" paying their membership fee, I would think that photonet has a legal obligation to stop the activity described. Just my humble legal opinion, although not worth much because its outside my field of expertise.</p>

<p>I don't think this was scripted, or that the Amazon user in quesiton has the assistant of a bot for this. He's a wackadoo with some sort of highly acute image-re-posting OCD. I couldn't stop myself, and read some of his ramblings. He's a loon, that's all there is to it. But that doesn't mean that Amazon shouldn't pull the plug on hi m.</p>

<p>John... the irony is that this idiot COULD have simply looked at the images here, saved them locally, parked copies somewhere else, and THEN put them into the forum in question. If images can be seen on photo.net (or anywhere), they can be ripped off, too. There's no technical way to absolutely stop it, and thus PN can hardly be expected to bear some legal burden to do so. As it is, I've seen Josh step into the fray on more than one of these occasions, and either fix the problem (with the other hosting shop/site) or coordinate with the users here on what to do. I'm not sure what else he could or should do. </p>

<p>Photo.net does its best to protect users images, but has no legal obligation to do so. In fact it's impossible to do so. You can put up bigger and bigger hurdles which people have to jump over, but those hurdles would also apply to legitimate viewers.</p>

<p>Basically, if you can see it on your monitor screen, you can copy it.</p>

<p>The best defense against copyright violation is to (a) upload images too small to be worth actually stealing. I usually limit my uploads to 800 pixels. That's big enough to appreciate, but not big enough to be of any commercial use, and (b) put a copyright notice on the image. Of course a copyright notice can be cut or cloned out, but doing that shows a deliberate attempt to steal the image.</p>

<p>Only the holder of the copyright of an image (or their legally authorized representative) can file a DMCA complaint, which basically means the photographer has to do it. Photo.net does not hold the copyright and has no legal standing to file individual DMCA complaints, even if it wanted to and had time to. All photo.net can do is request whoever is hosting the images to remove them as a matter of courtesy. Most responsible websites will honor such requests. The problem with Amazon is that you're dealing with a large corporation so you have to figure out who has the power to make such a decision, then try to contact them. It can take time for such matters to pass along the "chain of command"</p>