Our Work Has Been Stolen
Please read this post; it’s important that we try to keep on top of things like this and protect our work.
I think I always knew this was going to happen. In fact, I caught someone a few years ago that had stolen one of my iphone photos and was distributing it to people that wanted to create composites. I wasn’t too upset about that because it wasn’t a great photo, and it probably wouldn’t have been used for anything since it was heavily edited. At any rate, a simple cease and desist worked.
This recent discovery is much more upsetting. It’s a bit of a rabbit hole that myself and other artists have been delving into the last few days. At first it looked like another poster website selling photographs that didn’t belong to them. A bit of research has lead us to believe its much worse.
I actually found some of your work on their site too. I’ll mention the names in a minute, but I honestly don’t want…
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Posted on July 22, 2015, in Photography. Bookmark the permalink. 12 Comments.
One Day | One Image 
I read this earlier today, like the man said, the Internet really is a Wild West where anything goes. Such a shame that people’s works are being stolen and used otherwise. Sickening really, sometimes I am embarrassed to be human. That sounds extreme but… Since I am just an amateur at photography, my photos aren’t that important really…
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John – I have to disagree that your photos “aren’t that important.” It’s YOUR work and YOUR vision which makes them important. It doesn’t have anything to do with being a professional or an amateur. (I’m not a professional photographer.)
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Thank you, so kind. I can’t understand a mind that willfully takes others photography to try to make money with it. I call this ‘evil’.
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I almost never sell anything, so maybe the risk on that website that’s got my stuff “for sale” is in reality quite minimal!
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Thanks for posting Melinda – I see that both your work and mine is on the website. I think it just does an on the spot search when a name is entered and you get the results – probably is running google in the background or similar.
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The thing is that my images on that site aren’t even my BEST ones…
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Just as well – it is some indiscriminate search engine bot that is generating the list on who knows what criteria. I bet if you checked again today it would be different ones. I suspect that if we check they are recording out IP addresses, and the names we are checking to add to the speed the next time someone checks, or similar. No end of nefarious things going on from the looks of it.
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I thought about going back to look, because I suspected the same thing. But I decided not to, because I didn’t want to bother with them any more.
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My work has also been purloined. Maybe WordPress could bolster its security like Smugmug? In any event if our work was not good would they steal it?
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I guess that’s a sort of consolation…!
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This is sickening. Could it be stopped? To share your talents with others and have to deal with this.
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It’s a risk, always, to post photos. But still disheartening when something like this happens.
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