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Most outrageous photo thefts
Vampman Studios wrote: Really Corey?! Jul 03 12 12:07 pm Link I shoot a lot of event work in DC and had an image stolen by a paper in Florida owned by the Village Voice. I can tell you they are some of the most arrogant, dishonest people I've ever dealt with. They basically said WE are the Village Voice...they first denied it was my image...then tried to throw out every usage clause they could find. I wanted to sue, but as most of you know I probably would have lost money even in winning. The photo was of a politician with an individual shot in a private home...even though they had no rights whatsoever they claimed it was a news shot due to the public figure...then they claimed it was news because it showed a relationship between the politician and the individual...at one point I even told them the home owner was going to take action because the image showed the inside of their residence...basically they just stretched it out and got away with it...as they probably knew they would...because of the cost that would have been involved. Now, if I had an image that was ripped off by a hack like Shepard Fairey and money was being made I would definitely sue. Unfortunately, with the Internet we are all open to having our work stolen. Jul 03 12 12:15 pm Link 95536 wrote: He He, Brilliant Jul 03 12 12:17 pm Link A few years ago I interviewed for a position at a local railroad. During the interview they gave me some pamphlets on their operation. On the way home at a traffic light I picked one up and looked at it. It had a picture of one of their locomotives I'd taken years before on the front. There was no mistaking it was mine because there was a truck passing behind it when I shot it. Best I could figure is they took it off one of two railfan sites where I had the image posted. And I didn't get the job. Jul 03 12 12:17 pm Link Sita Mae wrote: Went to a Studio party in LA , they had several Portfolios out , 3 of them had my images in them , I had never heard of the studio before. Jul 03 12 12:20 pm Link John Horwitz wrote: Gosh I hate when that happens!! The MM server has been having troubles the past 2 days Jul 03 12 12:22 pm Link When I was modeling a guy stole a bunch of images from MM and used them to try to hire models, he even was smart enough to use an image of me...Then tried to hire me, using stolen images of ME :_ Once a guy who was in the area ganked an image retouched it all fancy like, then sent it to the model and even was kind enough to print me a crappy copy. I ripped it up front of him at a meet an d greet. Jul 03 12 04:10 pm Link AExposures wrote: We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. Jul 03 12 04:26 pm Link Escalante wrote: Good grief. Jul 05 12 06:03 am Link J Welborn wrote: How did he get her real name?! You don't put that in your exif data do you??? I've been wondering if I should bring this up with photographers, but fear insulting them because putting it in the exif data would be so phenomenally stupid. Jul 05 12 09:11 am Link V Laroche wrote: People do that? Jul 05 12 10:06 am Link I had a photo lifted from here by a viable Publication- sent out as an ad to vendors to advertise with them as if we advertised with them. After a few letters regarding our position, they sent me a check for four figures (X,000) and promised they wouldn't do it again. I think the PDF file I sent them of the Copyright I own might have choked them. It's funny, if you go to their website- you can't download any images they have on their site- they have a program that says all their images are Copyright protected. We had a nice vacation last year. Jul 05 12 10:15 am Link It was a supposed publicists web site and they had a picture of mine on a billboard in Time Square, plus others under my name - since they were supposedly representing me and this was to show what they did for me. You know, got my photo on a billboard in Time Square, LOL. I was upset and had them remove everything under threat of a lawsuit, because when I asked nicely they wouldn't remove it. But I have to say, I enjoyed seeing my art on a billboard in Time Square, LOL. It looked awesome, hahahaha  Jul 05 12 12:00 pm Link 95536 wrote: LMFAO Brilliant!! Jul 10 12 06:48 am Link Sita Mae wrote: Meanwhile *this thread* languishes on the photography forum without any responses: May 16 13 09:21 pm Link  Moderator Note!Mystic Flow Studios wrote: You brought back a zombie thread because no one is posting in yours? May 16 13 09:29 pm Link One of my modeling photos was taken and used for some "dating" website. Apparently my name is Amy or something like that. lol May 16 13 09:30 pm Link I micro print my logo on the edge of every image. If some one takes any of my images i can have them look up my logo on the edge of the print. May 16 13 09:30 pm Link -The Dave- wrote: Maybe, maybe not. I just wanted to show how often this topic comes up, how little anyone has to say about how to solve it, and point people towards a potentially practical means of ending the problem. May 16 13 09:38 pm Link Sita Mae wrote: There's one image in my portfolio that was stolen, then used as an avatar for an iPad app. It was also used as an image within the app itself. I found out about this about a year after it happened....it was being distributed by several sites around the world and in several languages. It was also listed in the apple app store and iTunes sites. May 16 13 09:44 pm Link I had a regional publication rip a photo- once they got the letter- a check showed up FedEx Saturday Delivery. My wife and I had a wonderful week long holiday at our most dreamed of vacation spot~~~~~~~~ Locals pay lunch. Regionals pay vacay- I don't know what a national will do for you. If I find out- you won't here from me, I'll be somewhere else. May 17 13 06:29 pm Link I do a lot of real estate photography. There's a pretty big national company that provides a subscription service to Australian real estate agents, collecting data such as asking price, auction results, actual sales figures, time on market, etc, that, as part of their data collection, also harvests photos of properties for sale - without permission and in contravention of the usage rights attached to the images. They sell their subscriptions, thereby partly making money off of photographers' work. I have had two occasions where real estate agencies have picked up listings, using photos downloaded from the company's database. Now, every agency I work for has their name watermarked into the centre of the photo. One of my clients has a style guide that demands that their watermarked logo is placed in the top left corner. I've had these images cropped of their watermarks, but the centre ones, not once. I know people hate watermarks, but as a GK I recommend watermarking where possible to make tracing these stolen images and proving who took them that much easier. May 17 13 08:45 pm Link meh... I'm really not good enough to steal One of my images apparently is some womans facebook avatar. And several of my shots are big - in Iceland - judging by their usage on Icelandic websites. As for cropping watermarks off the edges - I usually will put a small mark in addition in the image, at 98% transparency. So if they get lazy and crop out my main watermark - they will likely miss the small "vintagevista" hidden in the shot. Any question and a simple enhancement will show my name on a cropped image. May 18 13 05:49 am Link Chinese stole this and put it on Iphone covers. It was done as a tribute to Salvador Dali and Phillip Halsman's original work. 18+ https://www.modelmayhem.com/portfolio/pic/26450968 May 18 13 06:06 am Link I worked briefly at a promotional modeling agency. After my stint ended, the photographer who replaced me took a photo of all the models wearing skimpy bikinis. I later did a gig and was given a card to a strip club, who said they might need a photographer. I went onto their site... and saw that bikini photo of the promo models dead center on the first page of their site. I reported it to my former boss, and that website no longer exists.  May 18 13 10:37 pm Link Someone grabbed a few of my images and used them as t-shirt graphics for sale on an online-store. When I got over the initial shock, I figured it was probably more trouble than it was worth to try to do anything about it. It certainly taught me a lesson, though. From that point on, I decided that anything that I really want to protect would never be posted on the internet. May 18 13 10:49 pm Link Michael Scot wrote: lol, if only that was true! Tumblr is full of them. May 19 13 04:55 pm Link I had a Fauxtog lift an image of a models MM port and then contact me to see if it was okay to retouch it and put it on Flickr. When I followed the link, he had already done it. He had it on Flickr with my original on the left and his version on the right, complete with his logo. I asked him to remove the logo but then i got a load of shizzle about him "finding" it on MM and him having a "right" to use. I followed Flickr's complaints process and in the meantime got pointed my local camera club to the pic to leave comments. He took it down before Flickr. Of course, I'm the jerk for not giving him permission to retouch and slap his logo all over it. May 19 13 05:01 pm Link Also a few years ago I went through a phase of receiving Facebook Invites from people about Club Nights which had my images all over them. They were all gay clubs in the Netherlands and Germany looking for free photos so would contact the models rather than the photographers. May 19 13 05:06 pm Link A fan of mine found a pic of mine on a webcam site so I went to check it out, I was floored how in the world this girl decided she was gonna get away with using a pic of me to try and drive an audience in to see HER on cam I'll never understand, thankfully I had actually previously worked for the same site YEARS previous to that and as soon as I contacted them about it it was removed within like 5 hours, but still lol don't think anyone would notice ur not the same girl in the pic?? lol May 21 13 02:24 pm Link One night I got an IM on my personal yahoo messenger saying simply "so you like anal huh?" I reply back WTF who IS this and where did you get my messenger. What are you TALKING about? The guy then proceeds to ask if this is Tiffany, also known as dovetail? I reply yes but that still doesn't explain who you are. He proceeds to go into conversation about who he is and how I am obviously offended but he saw my profile on xpeeps and it said to contact me yada yada yada, and sorry goodbye I'll leave you alone now So I am like WHOAH buddy hold up you're not going ANYWHERE you're going to explain this to me cause this is all news to me. How did you get my IM? What is on this site. What does this profile say? What info is there? He proceeds to tell me that my David Birdsong photos, alone with a few Matthew Dolinar photos, all art nudes, have been posted on xpeeps, a german porn site, under the profile name dovetail, and had this whole profile about how im a dirty slut, wants cam shows, likes anal, ect ect ect. This site had my full real name, my email addys, messenger names, real home address and phone number, photos, everything real info with a nasty sexual profile. I was LIVID. So I contact david and ask if he sold my pics to xpeeps, but that still didnt explain how all my real life personal info got on this thing. I couldn't even go look at the profile because you have to pay to sign up for the site. Took me 2 hours to figure out how to contact the site administrators directly through email. I threatened to sue for Libel, defamation of character, false representation, copyright infringment, slander, and anything and everything i could even come close to getting them for, and that I was passing ALL the info on to the photogrphers who owned copyright so they could all file separate lawsuits if the whole thing didn't come down in 24 hours. Told the guy in the IM to watch and see if it comes down and tell me if it did. He was quite flustered. Some poor guy who just happened to contact a fake profile. He was actually quite compliant in the whole process. Needless to say the profile was down in 2 hours. May 21 13 09:41 pm Link |
Really dude? Really? At the time I was enraged. Now I mostly think it's funny. 
