Not Van Goghs But Stolen Just The Same
Jun 12th, 2008 by Don Ray
While I was researching the new project that I heard of in David, I stumbled on a lot of my photos that have been lifted from my site and are being used as if taken by the poster. Now I have no problem with people using my photos for other publications as long as they provide a declaration of ownership and where they were obtained.
This isn’t the first time I found my photos on the skyscraper site. The first time, they were not only stealing my photos, but they were stealing my bandwidth as well, because they posting the photos pointing to my site.
At that time I wrote the site and they blocked the chiriquichatter.net address and all photos disappeared. This was good news and a bad news. My bandwidth usage dropped significantly on my photos, but I am unable to make a post telling people where to find more information on David. While the bandwidth theft was solved, now they just move the photos to one of the free photo sites and post them anyway. I need to work on this problem some more with skyscraper.com.
I have seen other blogs protecting their photos by putting watermarks on the photos. I really don’t want to do that, because it makes an ugly photo. So I guess I have no option other than complain. I will contact skyscraper.com again and see if they can change their edit to only block addresses from chiriquichatter.net that end in jpg.
Here is what I found today. Here is a post from skyscraper.com.
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showpost.php?p=19462411&postcount=331
Here are the associated CC posts that the photos were taken from.
http://www.chiriquichatter.net/blog/2008/02/21/progress-at-super-baru-in-the-chiriqui-mall/
http://www.chiriquichatter.net/blog/2008/03/31/blockbuster-video/
http://www.chiriquichatter.net/blog/2008/01/21/your-pizza-fix-is-nearing-completion/
Again, I have no problem with pul11 posting the photos as long as he had informed people where he got them.
Wondering how many more were in the site, I found this post. These came from Menandro and is listed as an administrator for the site. http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=351014 I recognize most of these photos came from my site. I haven’t bothered to post my URLs.
Here is another post from pul11. http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showpost.php?p=19656078&postcount=363
Here is my post http://www.chiriquichatter.net/blog/2008/04/11/chiriqui-center-coming/
I am sure there may be others, but I got tired of this exercise. I will tell you that skyscraper.com does have a lot of current information on David. It is all in Spanish, but you can use google to translate or you can use this site as a Spanish training exercise.
That’s really blatant.
I’ve had a number of photos “stolen” as well, mostly involving coverage I did of the first flight of a rebuilt P-38 airplane recovered from under 300 feet of Greenland ice. You may have seen this covered in a two-hour History Channel TV special; it was a VERY big deal.
I never bothered making a fuss about it, but one person’s personal web page covering that event has not only his own photos but also slightly cropped versions of mine that he is allowing people to think are his. A site called Hyperscale and the P-38 Association both are posting (and hosting) with permission.
I would estimate that about 1/3 of the photos on the web of that first flight are mine and completely uncredited as such.
Authorized photos on the P-38 site..
http://p38assn.org/images/p38s/gg/gg01runup-05.JPG
http://p38assn.org/images/p38s/gg/take-off3.jpg
On Christmas Day 2006, we had a waterspout form just off our balcony here in Panama city and I published a quick and dirty photo album to share with the expat community. It was immediately ripped without permission by Don Winner for use on his blog. If he’d asked, I would have given permission.
Now I no longer publish “timely” photos until they are aged enough to no longer be of use to commercial sites.
Very frustrating.
Hi Mike. When I have time I may write the site and ask that them to change their edit. Then at least I can post the address of where the original photo is.
When they were using my bandwidth, it was a more serious problem.
Hi Don,
I can really sympathize with your problem. I have an online store and a competing store in Canada was linking to my product images, thereby stealing the pictures and bandwidth. I updated the links to the pictures on my site to point to copies of the pictures with different names. Then, I replaced the images they were linking to with images that said “this image is being stolen from (my url). We have great prices. We ship to Canada! It took the competing store almost a year to notice. In the meantime I got a lot of free advertising.
To stop that problem in the future, I turned on hotlink protection on my server. You can probably discuss your problem with your web host. There are also ways to change the permissions of directories and files so that you can display your images, but it is very difficult for users to download them and repost them elsewhere, especially if you have a Linux host.
Kind regards,
Jennifer
Hi Jennifer. You obviously used a much better method than I did. You were very clever indeed. I will have to look into the rest of your suggestions. Thanks for taking the time to comment.