OT but concerning. :(

[Angela Johnson]

Have any of you had problems with theft and pbase?

I've noticed lately that a great deal of my photos had been direct linked, and I'd only done 3 of them. I have no idea who was direct linking the rest of them. I emailed pbase three times and asked them if there was a way I could find out, but didn't get any responses back.

So today, I resorted to shrinking my images down to 360 pixels on the long side, and putting a HUGE copyright on the actual image. I'm not very happy about this, but I don't want my images stolen.

This is now what they all look like:



Have any of you had this problem? How did you handle it?

--
angela
http://www.pbase.com/ziggers

 

[David Ramsay]

http://www.digimarc.com/PRODUCTS/IMAGEBRIDGE/MarcSpider/default.asp

Have any of you had problems with theft and pbase?

I've noticed lately that a great deal of my photos had been direct
linked, and I'd only done 3 of them. I have no idea who was direct
linking the rest of them. I emailed pbase three times and asked
them if there was a way I could find out, but didn't get any
responses back.

So today, I resorted to shrinking my images down to 360 pixels on
the long side, and putting a HUGE copyright on the actual image.
I'm not very happy about this, but I don't want my images stolen.

This is now what they all look like:



Have any of you had this problem? How did you handle it?

--
angela
http://www.pbase.com/ziggers

 

[Group Idiot]

Have any of you had problems with theft and pbase?

It's not just PBase, it's ANY site where you display your "intellectual property."

Unless you're a pro who makes money directly from these images why worry? I'd take it as more of a compliment rather than consider it theft of property. I know there's a debate upon the subject versus photographer -- ie: that flower isn't your original work, so you're just photographing something not unique that anyone has access to -- but that's beside the point.

Why ruin your beautiful photos with such a hideous blemish? It's like taking a marker to a Rembrandt!

I LOVE** how Phil Greenspun does (did) it. He says that all of his photos can be used in any fashion for any non-commercial purposes. For commercial purposes, all he wants is standard credit line and, under some situations, for the user to donate something to a particular charity that Phil endorses.

Take it as flattery, Angela. Don't resort to such tactics, but rather turn it into an advantage. I'd hate to stop looking at your images because of that nasty pock-mark.

Brendan
==========
Equipment list in profile -- where it BELONGS!

 

[Jeff Pritchard]

Angela,

Let me start out by saying - very nice rose image. What sort of lighting did you use?

Second, I wanted to expand on David's reply.

I noticed this happening on my own site (JeffPritchard.com) which is not related to pbase in any way. My ISP provides some interesting statistics pages that allow me to get sort of a 1000ft view of where the hits are coming from. For my site, the huge increase in traffic seems to have come through some of the search sites like Alta-Vista which use programs called "spiders" to crawl around on the web and hunt down images, which are then available to folks using the search engine. Now every time somebody types in "flower" into Alta-vista, your site gets a hit just to show you thumbnails in the list along with a few thousand others.

I don't remember the details so much now (this was a few months back), but I remember coming upon one bit of data during that investigation that led me to believe that some automated desktop image program had glommed onto my site and was serving up the images on peoples screen savers. I don't mind those folks looking at my images, but all the extra traffic generated by such things could end up costing the unsuspecting gallery owner some bucks.

I think there is a way to block your web pages from spider intrusions (some simple html at the beginning of the page text), perhaps there is a web designer out there who would share that data with us?

On further introspection, I decided to just not worry about it. If somebody were "stealing" your images, they would just come and grab them and be gone. Just one hit per thief. Most likely if you noticed a bunch of unexpected traffic, it's just some automated thing out there providing folks with a look at your images without charging them for it.

OTOH, you have a nice site. Maybe you just have a lot of fans!

best,
jp

Have any of you had problems with theft and pbase?

I've noticed lately that a great deal of my photos had been direct
linked, and I'd only done 3 of them. I have no idea who was direct
linking the rest of them. I emailed pbase three times and asked
them if there was a way I could find out, but didn't get any
responses back.

So today, I resorted to shrinking my images down to 360 pixels on
the long side, and putting a HUGE copyright on the actual image.
I'm not very happy about this, but I don't want my images stolen.

This is now what they all look like:



Have any of you had this problem? How did you handle it?

--
angela
http://www.pbase.com/ziggers

--
===================================================
Words to live by:
It's not about the stuff, never argue with an idiot, there is no spoon.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.jeffpritchard.com
===================================================

 

[Bill Brennan]

What is direct linking?
I have a pbase account too and am curious.

I have a gallery that has 17 images all showing variously 40-120 hits, except one. That image shows 1818 hits!! Does it exist (and get hit) somewhere else too?
inquiring minds want know...

--
http://www.pbase.com/billyb2

 

[Diane B]

Have any of you had problems with theft and pbase?

It's not just PBase, it's ANY site where you display your
"intellectual property."

Unless you're a pro who makes money directly from these images why
worry? I'd take it as more of a compliment rather than consider it
theft of property. I know there's a debate upon the subject versus
photographer -- ie: that flower isn't your original work, so you're
just photographing something not unique that anyone has access to
-- but that's beside the point.

Why ruin your beautiful photos with such a hideous blemish? It's
like taking a marker to a Rembrandt!

I LOVE** how Phil Greenspun does (did) it. He says that all of
his photos can be used in any fashion for any non-commercial
purposes. For commercial purposes, all he wants is standard credit
line and, under some situations, for the user to donate something
to a particular charity that Phil endorses.

Take it as flattery, Angela. Don't resort to such tactics, but
rather turn it into an advantage. I'd hate to stop looking at your
images because of that nasty pock-mark.

Over the last number of years I've had a number of requests to use my photos--many non-profit, but not always. Usually I ask for a credit since my parttime commercial work is where I make any money--not my personal work (altho' I sell some). I don't want to make my photos so small in my galleries that you can't enjoy them--or add any text. So--I know that mine are 'lifted' occasionally, but I've just decided to not worry about it--I can still sell that image if I choose---and I just don't want to get really angry about someone stealing my images--I'd rather others who want to can enjoy them--and that gives me pleasure.

Diane
--
Diane B
http://www.pbase.com/picnic/galleries
B/W lover, but color is seducing me

 

[Billie]

The argument that the flower's not her original work is flawed, IMHO. Mona Lisa wasn't created by Leonardo DaVinci, but she would have been a nobody had DaVinci not created this famous work of art.

And so it goes with photographs. The person taking the photo is using their talents at both camera usage and artistic abilities to create the photograph and using the photograph in ANY WAY without the "artist's" permission is a violation of international Copyright Law. Whether the photographer is a professional or not is completely irrelavent.

--
Kind Regards,
-Billie
http://homepage.mac.com/brkhan/Menu14.html

Unless you're a pro who makes money directly from these images why
worry? I'd take it as more of a compliment rather than consider it
theft of property. I know there's a debate upon the subject versus
photographer -- ie: that flower isn't your original work, so you're
just photographing something not unique that anyone has access to
-- but that's beside the point.

 

[Billie]

Reading your post made me wonder whether or not the number of hits a photo receives can be affected by whether or not you've posted the photo on this forum. Maybe each time a person logs on to that thread, the image is downloaded and it's reflected in the counter? Just a thought

What is direct linking?
I have a pbase account too and am curious.
I have a gallery that has 17 images all showing variously 40-120
hits, except one. That image shows 1818 hits!! Does it exist (and
get hit) somewhere else too?
inquiring minds want know...

--
http://www.pbase.com/billyb2

--
Kind Regards,
-Billie
http://homepage.mac.com/brkhan/Menu14.html

 

[Jim Radcliffe]

Suppose you walk in to a cardshop one day and see one of your images on a greeting card... ooooooooohhhhhhhh I can see those dollar signs flashing in your eyes.

While it may never happen, it could and if you have proof you took the picture and own the copyright to it.. well, let's get a lawyer in here to talk about legal legs to stand on.

As another poster said.. unless you're a pro, what's the beef?.. If you put it online someone will steal it.. even if it's not a great picture.. someone will think it is and copy (steal) it.

Check out the picture below.. I shot it a couple of months ago at a racetrack in Texas. It was a Willie Nelson concert..



I put it online in a gallery and guess what? A couple of weeks later I saw it on a T-shirt at another concert. A Willie fan had taken the picture and created his own Willie Nelson T-shirt using my image. Was I mad about it? No, actually a little flattered.. but had this guy been selling the t-shirts for $30.00 a piece I think I would have had to have a cut of the action. As it turned out it was an inkjet transfer on a cheap t-shirt with a hole in it.

The upside is if someone steals your stuff and they make money off of it.. you, legally, will probably be able to make money off of them... you just have to catch them.

It's sad that people think very little about ripping off others but it's been going on since one stone toolmaker covetted the work of another... and even before that.

Jim Radcliffe
--------------------------
http://www.image36.com
The ability to 'see' is more important than the gear.

 

[Jim Radcliffe]

Reading your post made me wonder whether or not the number of hits
a photo receives can be affected by whether or not you've posted
the photo on this forum. Maybe each time a person logs on to that
thread, the image is downloaded and it's reflected in the counter?
Just a thought

If you post it here... and 1000 people look at it in this forum... your server and that image is hit 1000 times.

--
Jim Radcliffe
--------------------------
http://www.image36.com
The ability to 'see' is more important than the gear.

 

[Adam-T]

Apart from the fact that in most cases Copyright goes over to the Client once the session is done.. I can only display live theatre from two companies of all the ones I shoot for for this reason.

I know that there is a possibility that my work may get used and there is nothing i can do about it - though I can't personally see anyone wanting much of it as after being a commerial hack for so long, I've not got the landscape Skills OR the Locations to shoot in of the quality Forrest does etc

--
Please ignore the Typos, I'm the world's worst Typist

..Zero..to..Shot..Taken..in..16,000th..of..a..second----> EOS 1D

The No1 Dedicated 1D forum in the UK -------->

http://www.1dforum.co.uk/php/phpBB2/

 

[Billie]

Have you contacted Willie Nelson's publists regarding this photo? It would look great on a CD cover

Suppose you walk in to a cardshop one day and see one of your
images on a greeting card... ooooooooohhhhhhhh I can see those
dollar signs flashing in your eyes.

While it may never happen, it could and if you have proof you took
the picture and own the copyright to it.. well, let's get a lawyer
in here to talk about legal legs to stand on.

As another poster said.. unless you're a pro, what's the beef?..
If you put it online someone will steal it.. even if it's not a
great picture.. someone will think it is and copy (steal) it.

Check out the picture below.. I shot it a couple of months ago at a
racetrack in Texas. It was a Willie Nelson concert..



I put it online in a gallery and guess what? A couple of weeks
later I saw it on a T-shirt at another concert. A Willie fan had
taken the picture and created his own Willie Nelson T-shirt using
my image. Was I mad about it? No, actually a little flattered..
but had this guy been selling the t-shirts for $30.00 a piece I
think I would have had to have a cut of the action. As it turned
out it was an inkjet transfer on a cheap t-shirt with a hole in it.

The upside is if someone steals your stuff and they make money off
of it.. you, legally, will probably be able to make money off of
them... you just have to catch them.

It's sad that people think very little about ripping off others but
it's been going on since one stone toolmaker covetted the work of
another... and even before that.

Jim Radcliffe
--------------------------
http://www.image36.com
The ability to 'see' is more important than the gear.

--
Kind Regards,
-Billie
http://homepage.mac.com/brkhan/Menu14.html

 

[Billie]

Adam, I thought the copyright always remained with the photographer unless they sold the copyright with the photos. I know one is forbidden to scan and print images taken by someone else unless the photo is over 75 years old, or atleast that's what the agreement that I have to agree to before printing at Wal-Mart.

Apart from the fact that in most cases Copyright goes over to the
Client once the session is done.. I can only display live theatre
from two companies of all the ones I shoot for for this reason.

I know that there is a possibility that my work may get used and
there is nothing i can do about it - though I can't personally see
anyone wanting much of it as after being a commerial hack for so
long, I've not got the landscape Skills OR the Locations to shoot
in of the quality Forrest does etc

--
Please ignore the Typos, I'm the world's worst Typist

..Zero..to..Shot..Taken..in..16,000th..of..a..second----> EOS 1D

The No1 Dedicated 1D forum in the UK -------->

http://www.1dforum.co.uk/php/phpBB2/

--
Kind Regards,
-Billie
http://homepage.mac.com/brkhan/Menu14.html

 

[Jim Radcliffe]

Have you contacted Willie Nelson's publists regarding this photo?
It would look great on a CD cover

Thanks for the compliment but ... unsolicited photos, like unsolicited songs are usually returned to the sender. They (stars and record labels) hire pros to take those CD cover shots. I would love to see that shot on the cover of Willie's next CD but I have no illusions about it happening.

In another life I was in radio (on the air) for over 30 years. I know all about the music industry, songs, photos, etc. I was actually a little surprised that cameras and video devices were not restricted the night of the concert.

By the way, the picture actually looked pretty good on the t-shirt but it would have looked better on a black t-shirt.

Jim Radcliffe
--------------------------
http://www.image36.com
The ability to 'see' is more important than the gear.

 

[Group Idiot]

The argument that the flower's not her original work is flawed,
IMHO. Mona Lisa wasn't created by Leonardo DaVinci, but she would
have been a nobody had DaVinci not created this famous work of art.

I didn't say I agreed with it, only that it was oft-debated.

Brendan
==========
Equipment list in profile -- where it BELONGS!

 

[Billie]

Guess I read that wrong. Those who agree with that statement are probably the ones doing the "stealing" ;-)

The argument that the flower's not her original work is flawed,
IMHO. Mona Lisa wasn't created by Leonardo DaVinci, but she would
have been a nobody had DaVinci not created this famous work of art.

I didn't say I agreed with it, only that it was oft-debated.

Brendan
==========
Equipment list in profile -- where it BELONGS!

--
Kind Regards,
-Billie
http://homepage.mac.com/brkhan/Menu14.html

 

[MateoV]

Do a search on google with the url of an image you think is being linked, but put "link:" before it (without quotes and no space after the colon).

This will list all the sites that have a link to that particular url. You can do this for any web address.

http://www.mateov.com

 

[Mary Jo Sminkey]

I think there is a way to block your web pages from spider
intrusions (some simple html at the beginning of the page text),
perhaps there is a web designer out there who would share that data
with us?

Hi, guess I'm the resident web programmer here, so thought I'd answer this particular question.

Yes, there is a way to block the spiders, you need to put a robots.txt file in your top directory. Just do a search on google, you should be able to find plenty of information on how to do it. Not sure this would help for pbase, but if you do your own galleries, might be worth looking at.

--
----------------------
Mary Jo Sminkey
Dog Action Photography
http://www.printroom.com/pro/dogpatch

 

[Angela Johnson]

I used natural light for the rose. It was in full sun outside, so I stood over it to make a shadow and shot that way (a useful trick I've done a lot).

Very interesting about the "spiders".

I will have to research this more...

angela

Second, I wanted to expand on David's reply.

I noticed this happening on my own site (JeffPritchard.com) which
is not related to pbase in any way. My ISP provides some
interesting statistics pages that allow me to get sort of a 1000ft
view of where the hits are coming from. For my site, the huge
increase in traffic seems to have come through some of the search
sites like Alta-Vista which use programs called "spiders" to crawl
around on the web and hunt down images, which are then available to
folks using the search engine. Now every time somebody types in
"flower" into Alta-vista, your site gets a hit just to show you
thumbnails in the list along with a few thousand others.

I don't remember the details so much now (this was a few months
back), but I remember coming upon one bit of data during that
investigation that led me to believe that some automated desktop
image program had glommed onto my site and was serving up the
images on peoples screen savers. I don't mind those folks looking
at my images, but all the extra traffic generated by such things
could end up costing the unsuspecting gallery owner some bucks.

I think there is a way to block your web pages from spider
intrusions (some simple html at the beginning of the page text),
perhaps there is a web designer out there who would share that data
with us?

On further introspection, I decided to just not worry about it. If
somebody were "stealing" your images, they would just come and grab
them and be gone. Just one hit per thief. Most likely if you
noticed a bunch of unexpected traffic, it's just some automated
thing out there providing folks with a look at your images without
charging them for it.

OTOH, you have a nice site. Maybe you just have a lot of fans!

best,
jp

Have any of you had problems with theft and pbase?

I've noticed lately that a great deal of my photos had been direct
linked, and I'd only done 3 of them. I have no idea who was direct
linking the rest of them. I emailed pbase three times and asked
them if there was a way I could find out, but didn't get any
responses back.

So today, I resorted to shrinking my images down to 360 pixels on
the long side, and putting a HUGE copyright on the actual image.
I'm not very happy about this, but I don't want my images stolen.

This is now what they all look like:



Have any of you had this problem? How did you handle it?

--
angela
http://www.pbase.com/ziggers

--
===================================================
Words to live by:
It's not about the stuff, never argue with an idiot, there is no
spoon.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.jeffpritchard.com
===================================================

--
angela
http://www.pbase.com/ziggers

 

[David Ramsay]

Actually I wanted to point out a service by Digimarc that you first embed a digital watermark in your image. When registered, a webspider will look for copies of your image and reports back to you.
I didn't want to go into it too much since I do work for the company.
Cheers.

Second, I wanted to expand on David's reply.

I noticed this happening on my own site (JeffPritchard.com) which
is not related to pbase in any way. My ISP provides some
interesting statistics pages that allow me to get sort of a 1000ft
view of where the hits are coming from. For my site, the huge
increase in traffic seems to have come through some of the search
sites like Alta-Vista which use programs called "spiders" to crawl
around on the web and hunt down images, which are then available to
folks using the search engine. Now every time somebody types in
"flower" into Alta-vista, your site gets a hit just to show you
thumbnails in the list along with a few thousand others.

I don't remember the details so much now (this was a few months
back), but I remember coming upon one bit of data during that
investigation that led me to believe that some automated desktop
image program had glommed onto my site and was serving up the
images on peoples screen savers. I don't mind those folks looking
at my images, but all the extra traffic generated by such things
could end up costing the unsuspecting gallery owner some bucks.

I think there is a way to block your web pages from spider
intrusions (some simple html at the beginning of the page text),
perhaps there is a web designer out there who would share that data
with us?

On further introspection, I decided to just not worry about it. If
somebody were "stealing" your images, they would just come and grab
them and be gone. Just one hit per thief. Most likely if you
noticed a bunch of unexpected traffic, it's just some automated
thing out there providing folks with a look at your images without
charging them for it.

OTOH, you have a nice site. Maybe you just have a lot of fans!

best,
jp

Have any of you had problems with theft and pbase?

I've noticed lately that a great deal of my photos had been direct
linked, and I'd only done 3 of them. I have no idea who was direct
linking the rest of them. I emailed pbase three times and asked
them if there was a way I could find out, but didn't get any
responses back.

So today, I resorted to shrinking my images down to 360 pixels on
the long side, and putting a HUGE copyright on the actual image.
I'm not very happy about this, but I don't want my images stolen.

This is now what they all look like:



Have any of you had this problem? How did you handle it?

--
angela
http://www.pbase.com/ziggers

--
===================================================
Words to live by:
It's not about the stuff, never argue with an idiot, there is no
spoon.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.jeffpritchard.com
===================================================