Feb 24
Stolen
Today I was notified that someone had stolen my pictures, this is the first time I’ve known of it to happen. The person who emailed me had several of her pictures displayed on this same site, but she asked if I could help in stopping the thief permanently. The site is full of images ripped from all over the place, the copyright information is clearly visible in most of them! I was told that even the horoscopes that this person is posting on the blog are ripped from another site. Apparently, no original thoughts in his head… Anyway, I found that my image was hotlinked directly from my site, so the fastest way to stop this unauthorised use was to use .htaccess.
This is what it looked like before:
And this is with hotlinking blocked:
If you’re a photographer, maybe you want to check the site yourself… Â at the moment of posting this, my image (or the warning) is on linked page but it’s a blog so the page number may change in time.
Although I’m taking measures to stop this, it doesn’t mean that I’m really terribly worried. I don’t make money with photography so somebody using my pictures without permission is not ripping me off financially – it’s just ripping off, period. It’s the principle of it that bugs me, if someone asked me if they could use my images non-commercially, I’d most likely permit them to do it. But using without permission, I’m offended.
I read an article today where they speculated that filesharing is so common these days that people don’t understand anymore what intellectual property really is. So even though they hear everywhere in the media that downloading music and movies and software is illegal, their moral compass is so skewed by the ubiquity of filesharing that they don’t consider they’re doing anything wrong. But you know what? Just because everybody is doing it, it doesn’t make it right. Now I’ve experienced first hand what it feels like to be at the losing end of copyright infringement, and I can’t say I enjoyed it much. Revenge however, that was sweet…
7 comments
World of thieves.. :@
About the code, I didn’t get it working, no matter what I tried
Nice to see that you succeeded though.
Is your site on a Windows platform? .htaccess doesn’t work this simple on Windows… do a search for htaccess and Windows and hopefully you’ll find instructions.
I changed the text for my anti-hotlink image, thought maybe the original was a bit too offensive. I can’t remember if I’ve linked to my own images from other sites, or allowed some other people to do it, so I don’t want to be all too rude so as not to put good sites in bad light!
So, I then tried to report the copyright violation to MySpace. I followed the links they have provided and when I clicked to go to the form where I report the abuse:
“Sorry! an unexpected error has occurred.
This error has been forwarded to MySpace’s technical group.”
Yeah I bet they really respect intellectual property.
I think that the person who is using your images here does not have a clue what is copyright. This person seems to just take random nice looking images to use in his/her blog. Remember, most people in this interwebnet thingie do not have slightest clue what is what (remove ie icon from desktop and they will ask where did the internet go)…
I am not defending him/her at all, but that is what I think happened here.
This person knows… he has been notified. The person who emailed me to say that images are being used without permission has tried to stop him for a while now.
Other than that, yes you are right that many times people don’t realise that they are doing wrong. That’s what I meant with what I wrote in the last paragraph of the post.
OK, in such case, as he/she has been informed this is something quite different…
And yes, I read last paragraph only after writing my comment…need more coffee apparently
AFAIK, Futuron is using *nix-servers, but you can never know..