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How are you making sure no one steals your work?
I have to open this topic by thanking Dean who is one of the admins for MM. He made me aware that I have been rather irresponsible with making sure my work isn't being stolen or passed off as someone else's. It turns out that some of my work has shown up on a few other sites and without my knowledge. In the past I have used Tin Eye to check when I've had a concern but that's a manual process. Would anyone know of a service or something like that which will constantly monitor your copyrighted images to make sure they're not misused? I appreciate your time reading this. Thank you! Oct 07 22 03:01 pm Link I don't know of any program that will monitor use of photos on the internet, but it should be easy enough to create and regularly run a script that does so through Tin Eye or Google image search. Also, there are several ways to hide identity/copyright text in photos. I usually just put copyright info in the exif metadata in three separate places, using a simple, one-line batch command, that does so to all images in a directory. You can also use a GUI exif editor or a photo editor to do the same. This video demonstrates how to use Photoshop to insert identity info into exif data, and it also shows a way to paint hidden text onto the image. Another option is to embed a short line of text into an image simply by using the command line. This command works in Linux, and it should also work in a Mac Terminal, but it might work in the Windows command line as well (but you might have to add quotes around the image file name): echo "copyright 2022 Gold Rush Studio" >> your_image.jpg Then, open the image in a text editor (such as Notepad) and you should see the the text at the very /bottom end of the binary characters in the file. echo "copyright 2022 Gold Rush Studio" >> *.jpg Here is a step-by-step tutorial on inserting text with the Windows command line. Oct 07 22 04:30 pm Link I don’t make sure, but I’ve reduced risk of theft with the following: 1. Some images I’ve never placed online. Some I give directly to the client. If they are stolen after that, it’s their issue, not mine. When I shot for a college, I never published or shared any of the images until after the college had used them. If it’s stock, it’s in their site only protected by their safeguards. 2. Post at a reduced resolution a thief can’t do much with. 3. Make it very clear I am the copyright holder. Many incorrectly assume any published image is public domain, free from copyright protection. I make it clear this isn’t the case. 4. Images I want secure, I keep on my desktop computer, not any portable devices so the risk of physical theft is minimal, and I think the risk of hacking is also very minimal. 5: In many cases, I just don’t worry about it. For example I recently posted some low res images on a hiking forum. They have no particular value to me other than such sharing, so it’s no big deal if someone reposts them elsewhere. If it was a big deal, I wouldn’t post them in the first place. (See #1). The percent of images I feel a strong need to safeguard from theft just isn’t that big. The reality is most of my images have little value and for most, I’m not really out anything if they are illegally copied. Part of risk management is knowing when it’s best to simply accept a loss. Oct 09 22 10:54 am Link Was your work “Stolen”? You mean you no longer have it because someone took it from you? I guess that would be possible if your computer was stolen and you didn’t have a backup elsewhere. But I think you mean “How do you prevent copyright infringement?” And the answer is…you can try, but if you put anything on line, it can be copied. If Disney with their gazillions of dollars couldn’t keep Hocus Pocus 2 off of a hundred bootleg Plex servers the day of release, what do you realistically think your chances are if someone really wants your image and it’s out there on some free site (like Model Mayhem) or even behind a hackable paywall? So, to prevent it 100%, don’t put any content on line. Now ask yourself - what is the bigger barrier to success: copyright infringement, or obscurity? Before someone decided that I am saying “Go ahead and use anything I have produced, because I don’t care” - not exactly…a large portion of my stuff that is in the public view is filed through the Copyright office, and most stuff that you can get to on line easily has metadata tags and steganographic data implanted because I’m a nerd and do stuff like that. All of that could be defeated if someone is sincerely trying, but it’s not trivial. A subset of my output is actually published “Copyleft” and is available for remix by other artists and further use with attribution…because obscurity is a much bigger problem than copyright infringement to me… Oct 10 22 02:51 pm Link Thank you all for your thoughtful responses. And the situation for me was a Russian brides website advertising a "21 year old" girl with a picture of mine that was easily 14 or more years old. The model has got to be 35-40 now. Another one looked like they were ghosting the model with a page of her shots and mine were mixed in with them. The last was on Deviant Art and the person was representing several of my shots as his. Again, thank you! Oct 10 22 04:35 pm Link Abbitt Photography wrote: I agree with 1, 3, and 5, but would say that you might be surprised at what some of the up-res software out there can do with a low-res file, There are also many ways to use even a low-res image if someone likes its composition as a design element, etc. Oct 10 22 09:01 pm Link I tie one of my pit bulls to each and every image I take . . . course, since my two pittys are basically lap dawgs that sleep 23.45 hours a day, I'm still experiencin' a lotta pilferage . . .  All my work is copyrighted, and a lot is also trademarked (because of final usage), but I still have it show up in places I know it shouldn't be, I try not to post too much final work on line, and sometimes use hidden trigger buttons in the images that are viewable . . . having had some of the pieces sell in the NFT marketplace makes it even harder to keep track . . . SOS Oct 11 22 12:14 pm Link sospix wrote: I like the idea about the pit bulls! Oct 11 22 02:20 pm Link I'm quite sure that no one wants my work, except for the people who pay for it to be made of them - because I do not shoot celebrities or anything worth money in a larger context. Just random people who like to feel glamorous, or wear fantastical clothing, or no clothing in fantastical settings. That content is basically worthless to everyone except the creator and the subject. Oct 12 22 07:53 am Link For the most part, truly original ideas are very few and far between. I don't consider any of my photography to present an original idea, nor do I see many other ports with anything that would be worth "stealing". Almost nothing in fact and the reality is that anybody can make their own version of a photograph without fear of retribution. "Artistic concepts" are difficult to defend and lawyers are not inexpensive. As Al Vee notes above, unless we are photographing celebrities, we don't have much worth stealing and almost nothing worth litigating. The internet is international, complicating the issue to a point of utter futility. The "market" as it relates to the world we live in is beyond flooded with images. Mostly mundane images of the same old same old. If you are shooting weddings you can make a living in populated areas. Some can photograph food for menus, others may prefer to shoot used cars. Senior portraits can be profitable but is seasonal work at best. Catalog work is not much different than being a short order cook, except that everybody eats and very few people pay to have photography work done. You could spend your life searching for the possibility that somebody somewhere is using one of your images in an unethical manner because they are not paying you a percentage of the more or less nothing that somebody else paid to glance at your photo. Or you could spend that time doing something more meaningful or profitable. I've chosen the latter. Oct 12 22 09:21 am Link Double post ugh. Oct 12 22 09:21 am Link Model Mayhem forums: delivering simple and easy double posting since 1993. Oct 13 22 07:31 am Link Is there an echo in here? Oct 13 22 07:31 am Link Gold Rush Studio wrote: That’s ok, I’d prefer someone more age appropriate anyway in a Russian bride. Oct 13 22 07:31 am Link I've done a LOT to collect money from copyright thieves over the years. I've had photos of mine used illegally in major magazines, newspapers, websites, you name it. I once had a local photographer using my photos to advertise her business on craigslist and I once had a photo of mine used in an article in the Houston Press newspaper, which was funny because when I got on the phone with the publisher of the newspaper her first response was, "How much do we owe you and where do we mail the check?". That said, if you're going to lose sleep over someone stealing your photos you're doing this all wrong. Watermarks wont protect anything and using ultra low-res photos won't either. Also, be prepared, because your best work is rarely stolen. That's a lesson that took me a lot of years to really wrap my head around. It's worth repeating, your best photos are almost never stolen. It's always some goofy photo you shot for something on a blog or social media that's taken, never something killer in your portfolio. People steal photos because they don't want to pay for stock images. That's usually the case as to why they take them. They go to google, type in a topic of a photo they are looking for, then just rip it off that way. For example, I shot this photo for a blog many years ago:  It's not really anything spectacular. At one point this photo was being stolen from me about ten times per month. I'd find it on the header of a London limousine company website, on a Vegas travel website, etc. etc. etc. I used to get really upset about this but then I realized, don't get mad, GET EVEN! I then started going after these thieves financially. I have a system that I've created that is almost foolproof for collecting money from these scumbags, and if that doesn't work, I sick an attorney on them. I just wrapped up a legal battle with one jerk wad who decided to take one of my photos and sell it on all sorts of merchandise from pillow covers to coffee mugs. He decided to play the tough guy and he lost. If they are overseas, I just send a DMCA takedown notice to their hosting company. If they are a really small-time operation, I have a different strategy. I had a photo stolen by some dopey web designer in Kentucky who used my image on a website for a bed-and-breakfast owned by a retired couple. I didn't see the value in demanding money for the theft so I went a different route. Let them use the photo and then request they put a back-link on their website to mine, crediting me with the image. Now I have another back-link to my website, helping me with my SEO. That's worth more sometimes than the monetary gain I'd get from going after them. The key to all of this though is you do need to register your keeper photos with the US Copyright Office. If you don't do that, you have no real legs to stand on legally. If it ever comes to a legal fight, the FIRST thing any attorney will ask you is when you registered the images relative to when they were first published (you have 90 days). Once you've filed, you're good to go, and you can then go for punitive in addition to compensatory damages, and that's a really huge deal. I will say this though, it's hard to find something more gratifying than listening to some weasel on the phone crying because he knows he's got to pay you money in lieu of being sued into oblivion for stealing one of your photos. Oct 20 22 12:02 am Link |
