The photograph of the girl in the window above is a self-portrait taken by photographer Lara Jade, now 17, when she was 14. The image was ripped off by someone (either a stock photography organization or a porn company) and now is the cover of a porn DVD. Click on the image for more details.

This is a somewhat common occurrence. Not with the underage girl/porn company angle, but photos on the internet getting ripped off. I’m not talking about people just hotlinking images, I’m talking about companies ripping off images without permission and using them to make money. The common defense seems to be “well, we bought that image from somebody else who told us they owned it, so it’s not our fault.”

Occasionally the situation can be amicably resolved. A case in point is James Duncan Davidson , a software developer/photographer who took this great photo of the iPhone:

You can read some of the details on his blog. A website took his photo, cropped out his watermark in the corner, and posted it on their site without any credit. What seemed to happen then was that a bunch of people bitched about and to the infringers, who then complied with his request to credit the photo properly and to not crop his watermark out of the picture. Mr. Davidson is a relatively popular software developer, speaker, and author. When he complained on his blog about the infringing website, he had a posse behind him in a second.

A similar situation occurred with flickr user Rebekka, who is, as far as I can tell, the most popular flickr user in existence. Within an hour of posting a picture, she’ll have more comments and favs than even the most popular of my shots. A while ago she found out that a company had been stealing her images, making prints, and selling them. She got no credit and received no money. After contacting the company, trying to resolve the issue, and failing, she posted on flickr about the situation. The biggest problem is that the offending company was in Britain while she is in Iceland. The ensuing shitstorm of comments grew to almost 500 when flickr deleted the photo, along with the comments. This is a whole other issue so I’m not going to address it here, but other commentary is available. (spoiler: flickr apologized)

Some people decide to deal with this by putting horrendous copyright watermarks on their images. I use the word “horrendous” here to refer to watermarks that seriously impair my ability to enjoy the picture. Here’s an example:

Putting a huge watermark right in the middle of a picture just doesn’t work for me. It’s definitely a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face. And, as Mr. Davidson showed us, putting the watermark in the corner doesn’t work so well either because it can be cropped out. So what can be done? I’m not really sure. I haven’t run into this situation yet, but I imagine that I’ll be fairly mad when I do. I put a whole lot of time, effort, and money into my photography, and for someone to rip off the fruits of my labor would likely rub me the wrong way. I don’t plan on watermarking my images, and I don’t have a posse to help me out. I do upload smaller images to flickr than I used to, though. I rarely go above 800, although there’s the occasional 1024 or 1200 picture.

If you want to use a picture of mine, just ask!

UPDATE: Immediately after posting this, I saw an article on the same topic on PopPhoto Flash. It has a lot of good advice on what to do if someone does rip your images off, although it’s mostly applicable to cases where both parties are in the USA.