Have you seen my Hawaiian bikini model photos lately? You probably have and it’s quite possible that you weren’t even visiting my website! HINT: albumforfun.com is not my site!
The following are my continuing thoughts about copyright infringement - content theft: stealing other people’s photos (OPP).
Content theft has been around as long as content has. There is one way you can protect your images from being stolen: never put them online!
Because I periodically check how my photos from this website rank in Google image searches I came across a few new copyright violators. In this post I will describe what I do when I have some time to kill and go after content thieves.
All reference links in this post will open in a new window for your convenience to accompany the examples mentioned.
Which Photos Are The Most Likely To Be Stolen?
More than likely photos belonging to high visibility websites which are found via Google or various other image search engines.
It is a catch 22, if you want your photos to be popular on image searches for the sake of traffic for your website you will be automatically opening yourself up for content theft.
If naming your photos in a descriptive way is not a must and being visible in image searches is not crucial for your online exposure, keeping the digital camera default image file names will offer instant protection.
Example: your dsc_0001.jpg image file will be nicely blending in with almost 100,000 other pictures. It is not a foolproof protection like image search abstinence but a start.
Tagging has the opposite effect making Flickr the largest free stock photo site on the net.
How To Find Out Who Stole Your Photos?
So in my case I did an image search for hawaii swimsuit model. Notice the search is unfiltered (SafeSearch is Off) which will bring up adult material but it provides the widest scope of image search results therefore recommended for finding all copyright violators.
Look, very nice job I have the top 3 spots, how cool is that?
There is only one hiccup: I do not have a Photobucket account! Content Thief Busted! Photobucket is a trusted website therefore this stolen image is showing up close to the top but fortunately after my website’s result. Later on we will dig deeper for less popular websites.
By following the stolen image we arrive at a World of Warcraft forum page where we can find the link to the Photobucket image itself.
This is not a hotlinked photo nevertheless this is content theft because the image is hosted on Photobucket and if my website was not so high in the image search results the Photobucket image would undoubtedly precede it stealing my spotlight and my traffic.
But let’s not stop here, that Photobucket link contains the word: “AlienFetusProduction” so perhaps we can investigate further who the account belongs to and if there are other stolen images there.
By doing an image search for AlienFetusProduction we can find not only my photo but an altered BW version of it as well (with a guy’s face pasted over the model’s head):
A few pages later Google image search brings up another copy of my hawaiian swimsuit model photo from a website called bodiglyphix.com:
The image is not hotlinked which would be the better scenario because it would be promoting my website but instead it is hosted on the bodiglyphix server.
Something ironic to note, the Google image copyright notice in the upper left corner of the image search window is now warning against illegal use from the content thief:
Let’s now visit bodiglyphix.com to confirm the image is there:
It is one thing to “decorate” a personal blog with copyrighted images but to promote a business and earn revenue without payment and photo credit is another.
Just in case the photo in question is no longer on the page you can find a cached copy on Google going back a few days or weeks by using the cache: search prefix.
A screenshot of this cached page can be filed away as further evidence if you wish:
Let’s look at even more results of the same Google image search (by now I am on page 10 but your search results could be different) and BINGO we have another find, a different photo of mine but with the same model “courtesy of” AlbumForFun.com:
Google image search once again warns us the image may be copyrighted by AlbumForFun.com … hmmm .. yeah right:
After visiting AlbumForFun.com I discovered that there are 13 of my photos in that album right next to Angelina Jolie’s pictures. Under any other circumstance I would have been flattered but not this time.
All 13 photos were lifted from my Hawaiian Model Photography Album.
This kind of stolen content goose chase can go on and on, just quickly let’s look at another Google image search for fashion model photographer:
Fashionmodelingtips.blogspot.com (not my website of course) is a promo site for modelcruz.com. The website contains AdSense which means my photo is aiding someone’s money making efforts without backlink or photo credit.
The photo being used on this website is from my European Fashion Model Photography Album.
What To Do About Content Theft And Copyright Infringement?
This Goggle image search tracking method can only uncover the tip of the iceberg but after your mini investigation you can precede to have your image removed from an unauthorized website.
It is quite easy to get the necessary information to do so by looking up the owner in any of the Whois listings.
I like DomainTools but any will do.
Albumforfun.com has a private registration but you can notify the abuse department of the host company via the email address that is posted in every Whois record.
Copyright infringement is usually grounds for the immediate termination of the hosting account. On the other hand if the domain registration is public you can email the webmaster directly.
How To Avoid Content Theft?
Name your images non-descriptive, block Google from indexing your website I am not even going into what a joke watermarking is.
Even small and low resolution images can be useful for someone and flash albums offer little to no protection. So publish your photos in a book and sell those!
Good luck and happy shooting!
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