I thought the folks on this forum might be interested in this linked article about a firm that monitors the internet for stolen images and does recovery work to get compensation for photographers and illustrators.

ImageRights

Let me know what you think.

Jim

Hey Jim,

That IS rather interesting. First things first, unfortunately, this seems like a bit of a cumbersome process. You need to upload images to their site for them to know what to recognize. Of course, depending on how long you have been in business, that may take some time and a lot of organization.

I have not gotten yet into the mechanism of how they actually recover costs, but I am curious.

James

It actually has a feeling of wizardry to it, James. I'm not quite sure what to think about it or even if it's the real deal. Not sure how they do that recovery thing either -- and I've visited their site. Regardless, if it is real and they can do both the image-recognition and the recovery piece it would be a very powerful tool for professional photographers despite the cumbersome upload process.

Jim

Hey Jim,

Wizardry definitely seems like a good word. One thing I have just kind of gotten used to is that our images, if shared in a digital medium, are likely to be taken. In most cases, no harm done and honestly, I just don't know about it. However, I can imagine pretty easily that there may be times when real harm IS done.

Are you tempted to try it, Jim?

James

James,
since the service is free for a while, I'm thinking I'll sign up and see how (if) it works. I've had my images stolen off of websites that were promoting the results of a particular show. The last time was in 2007 when the owner of the dog that went Best Of Winners, simply went to the website where the win photos were posted and right-clicked on it, saved it to his computer and put it up on his website. Then was arrogant enough to email me and say the image wasn't good enough for advertising so he wasn't going to order any prints. Yet he was using it on his website to promote his dog as a stud and sell stud services at $2,500 each because he had won a National.

In this particular case, I found out because the guy was so slimy I started looking and actually found the image on the website of someone who was breeding to that dog. When I asked the woman whose site it was how she got the picture, she said she'd gotten it off of the Stud Dog owner's website. My lawyer is still pursuing the guy but the image is at least off of his website now.

The dollar value of that "lost" sale is around $30 so you start to wonder if it's worth the time to go after these people but if there's a service that can find those types of violations, it makes it far more worthwhile to go after all of them and collect the copyright violation fees. So, from that perspective, it's a very interesting service. I'll probably sign up and as I find out more, I'll report it here.

Jim

looks interesting, I signed up LOL but have to wait until I get home to upload anything my laptop doesn't host much