Photo theft in the news
A few days ago, I asked all of you if you had any experiences with other people using your photos without your permission. Shortly after I posted that story, I became aware of a story affecting Flickr photographer _rebekka. Apparently, someone had stolen her photos and uploaded them to iStockPhoto as their own. From _rebbeka:
“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 “porfolio” , 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.” (link)
Incredible.
Via Thomas Hawk
In my original post on this topic, I mentioned a new web service called Attributor that promises to help prevent this sort of thing. A rep from Attributor has since contacted me asking if I would be interested in looking at their public beta once they’re ready to accept individuals into the program. I told him that I absolutely would be interested. Hopefully, I’ll get to take a look at it soon and I will, of course, report back here on my findings.
If you have any photo theft stories you’d like to share, please fill out the form after the jump:
Tags: attribute, flickr, istockphoto, photo-theft, theft
