unauthorized posting of image

[John Ippolito]

What do you do when you come across an unauthorized use of one of your images? The eagle image is the contact page from my website with the contact info removed. I have no idea what this website is about or the language. I'm not sure if this is Dutch or maybe German. I'm still trying to figure out how to contact them to remove it.



http://www.enzovoort.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=6810&PN=2

[James Shadle]

First ask them to remove it or pay for it's use.
Michael Pancier is BPN's Administrative Consultant and an excellent attorney with copyright experience. If you don't get satisfaction, Michael's services may be necessary.

[John Ippolito]

Thanks, James. I first need to figure out how to communicate with the site.

[Steve Canuel]

Hi John,
Looks like Ducth so I plugged a few copied lines from the thread into the Google Dutch to English translator. Comes up with somewhat understandable sentences. Maybe one of our Dutch members can provide a better translation for you. Good luck.

[Kerry Perkins]

All of the images on that page seem to be lifted from other sites. A simple right click, then "properies" shows this link to your image - http://www.alaskawildernessimages.com/data/pages/templates_img/3_photo-12.jpg . The site seems to be some new age spiritual healing forum. How ironic... :confused:

Here is the WHOIS info for the site - http://www.cqcounter.com/whois/domain/enzovoort.com.html

[John Ippolito]

Hey Steve, Kerry, thanks for your assistance and detective work! Hope I can figure out how to contact the website.

[Gerald Kelberg]

Hi John,

Agree with Kerry's assessment. Your image, and several others, seem to have been posted by "bianca" to get traffic to her blog site - membership stands at her and two others at present. Her home page is http://justathought-bianca.blogspot.com/. Perhaps a message asking her to desist from copying other people's images would be appropriate! Otherwise you could contact the ISP that owns the forum and ask them to take down the illegal images - their details are easy to find - Vevida Services BV, Friesestraatweg 213d, 9743 AD Groningen, Netherlands + 31 50 549223, Erik Logtenberg (CEO) (www.vevida.nl ). You will be pretty sure to find they do business in English.

Hope this helps,

G.

[John Ippolito]

Gerald, thank you SO much for your assistance! Can't thank you enough. I will contact this person immediately.
BPN is an amazing organization!

[Axel Hildebrandt]

John,

I can understand that you are upset. On the bright side, this person seems just oblivious and at least is not trying to make money with the images.

[Blake Shadle]

I'm not exactly sure as to what to do... I'd have to go with my Dad's advice (he's been doin' this for a little while)... but I can say that's one heck of an eagle image :)

[Mark Theriot]

Just curious, how do you happen to find out about this infringement?

Mark

[Jason Franke]

2 more things to consider...

First, since they're appear to be hot linking your images (at least some of them) not hosting them themselves you can do something about that at your end by preventing images from being served to clients that aren't looking at a page on your site.

The exact specifics on how to do this are more complicated than I can really detail here, though you should be able to google "block hot linked images" or "hot linked image protection" and get some ideas of what's involved.

Second, since they are using images served by your server, in addition to pursuing them for copyright infringement you may also be able to pursue them for theft of service or something similar. Right now, not only aren't you being credited for the images, but you're paying for people to see them on that site.

[Jeff Donald]

Great advice on the hot linking, Jason.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

After getting the necessary documentation, you could also change the file names for now, which should break the links.

[William Malacarne]

Can you just change the picture that is hot linked with one of a jpg notice that says "This Picture Was Unlawfully Stolen From Someone Else's Sight".

Bill

[John Ippolito]

Thanks everyone for your great suggestions. Right now I'm exploring the hot linking with my web host server and waiting back for a reply. Also, changing the file name might do it temporarily Axel, but I guess the hot link idea would keep it from being linked in the future. Hope it works. Again, thanks everybody.

[Jason Franke]

Can you just change the picture that is hot linked with one of a jpg notice that says "This Picture Was Unlawfully Stolen From Someone Else's Sight".

Ultimately that's what you usually do, though it’s done automatically for you by your webserver.

This can be done automatically because every time your browser requests something from a webserver, it tells the server who sent it and because you can mangle things on your webserver. If you went to a page by typing in say "http://birdphotographers.net" into your browser the referrer filed will be blank since nobody sent you. However, if you’re looking at an image in one of the critique threads here, when your browser went to load that image it tells the server that it was being sent by birdphotographers.net. In our case we take advantage of the referrer bit and the fact we can serve whatever we want not necessarily, what was requested to stop hot linking.

Potentially scary non-photography stuff follows:

The following applies to people using Apache web server (most hosting providers use this).

You need to create an file in the root directory for your website called “.htaccess”. In that file, you add commands similar to the following:



RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?example\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpg [L]The first line tells the web server that you want to be able to mangle URLs before it does anything else with them.

The second line tells the server not to mess with things when the browser is referred by your domain; though obviously you have to change “example\.com” to your actual domain (the ‘\’ before the ‘.’ is important).

The third line stops people from just typing the image's URL into their browser directly. This would stop someone posting the image’s URL and telling people to copy and paste it into their address bar. However, it also will break embedding images into an email if you were going to do something like Mr. Morris's BAA Bulletin. Therefore, you might not want to do this.

The final line tells the server what files to match by extension (the "*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$” bit) and what to substitute ("/images/nohotline.jpg” bit). You’d need to change the last part to match where you put the image you want to serve up to hot linkers. What you serve in place of the real content is up to you though it must be an image file.

The result is when someone embeds your image in their webpage and someone visits the bad site, instead of seeing http://example.com/images/nicephotoofsomebirds.jpg they see the picture http://example.com/images/theiftisbad.jpg but you don’t have to do anything for each image and every image on your site is protected.

If you wanted to add an exception, say so you can post an image to BPN hosted on your sever, you'd add another line like the second one.


RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?birdphotographers\.net/ [NC]

[Roger Clark]

A couple of things. You can put the .htaccess file in any sub-directory so you can have the effects only apply to images in that directory if you wish. I have not used HTTP_REFERRER and I assume a
RewiiteEngine off
line would then turn it off after leaving that directory, correct?

But there may be an undesired side effect. If people hot link, your web server logs that hot link so you can go investigate. Without hot linking, people will simple copy your image and and then you get no record and have a harder time tracking down theft.

Theft is a fact of life. You could also use it as a way to advertise your site. Change the image to show your copyright and web site. I have a link to some guy's blog about he is a hollywood script writer and was railing about copyright theft, but he hot linked one of my images and covered my copyright with another image. I added a copyright to the other side so it shows on his blog what a hypocrite he is. Last time I checked, it was still there. :D

Roger

[John Ippolito]

Again, everyone thanks for the input.

Jason, thanks for taking the time to explain that, though I'm not sure I would attempt it myself.

Roger, your point on the hot linking undesired effect is also well taken and something to consider. And, oh BTW that is hilarious about the H'wood script writer! Thanks for putting some humor into my evening.

[Jason Franke]

A couple of things. You can put the .htaccess file in any sub-directory so you can have the effects only apply to images in that directory if you wish.
Yes, that would work as well.


I have not used HTTP_REFERRER and I assume a
RewiiteEngine off
line would then turn it off after leaving that directory, correct?Yes, that should work.

Htaccess files are interpreted in the order they are found starting with the highest level directory so if you had ~/mysite/.htaccess that turned rewriting on and one in ~/mysite/somefolder that turned rewriting off it should not rewrite your URLs. In more complicated cases where you've already got rewrite rules that you can't just turn off, you should also be able to back out the specific rewrite rules.


But there may be an undesired side effect. If people hot link, your web server logs that hot link so you can go investigate. Without hot linking, people will simple copy your image and and then you get no record and have a harder time tracking down theft. Not really for 2 reasons.

First, there's no way to readily tell if an image is going to be hotlink protected until you try and embed it in another page. This counts double so if you don't have the empty referrer rule in effect. So there will always be, in theory, a log entry for the forbidden image. Also, once you know a site is willing to do this you can add them to your watch list and manually check them out from time to time.

Second, by default Apache doesn't log there referrer so you would have a hard time figuring out what was being hot linked unless that site was getting significantly more traffic than your site did normally. Or, at least the easy way of grepping the logs for images and non-local referrers wouldn't be useable.

You can't fix the latter problem with a .htaccess file either, it has to be done in the either the server or virtual host config files which you usually don't have access to with most providers.



Theft is a fact of life. You could also use it as a way to advertise your site. Change the image to show your copyright and web site.I was going to suggest this but I didn't have a good solution to recommend on how to do it.

I would probably end up writing a PHP script that used ImageMagik or GD to add a watermark that are hot linked and not the rest. The basics aren't too hard, it probably wouldn't take more than an hour or two to build and test the script. That and the script would make logging and finding trouble sites a lot easier. But that's probably out

But yes, this is why you don't put full resolution images up on the web if you also sell/license that kind of thing. You can't stop someone from taking it and if they're really willing to go though the trouble cloning your watermark out after doing so. The best you can do is accept it's going to happen and not put to high of resolution files up.




P.s. John, if you run into a problem or your host can't help you PM me and I may be able to give you a hand, caveat being free help is worth what you pay for it.

[Roger Clark]

Jason,

Thanks for the info. One question, you say:
"Second, by default Apache doesn't log there referrer so you would have a hard time figuring out what was being hot linked"

But that is not my experience. Apache on both red hat linux and ubuntu linux seem to be configured to log hot links by default (at least I think so--I did edit the config file but don't remember turning this on explicitly). I have web servers running on both.

Roger

[Jason Franke]

But that is not my experience. Apache on both red hat linux and ubuntu linux seem to be configured to log hot links by default (at least I think so--I did edit the config file but don't remember turning this on explicitly). I have web servers running on both.

Ya, actually you seem to be right. When I wrote that I was basing it on the Apache documentation for LogFormat and didn't actually look at the logs my servers generate or how they were configured. Mea culpa.

[John Ippolito]

Still no response from my site host. The host of the ISP involved wrote back to say:

"I understand your concern about your pictures, but we can't ask the
poster who used the link directly form your site to remove the link. The Dutch law permit deeplinking."

Maybe it is legal here also as Roger's experience may indicate.
At any rate, I took the image down and replaced it, so it is off the ofending forum.

[Jeff Donald]

You could also create a graphic that says something to the effect that "the person uses pictures without getting permission from the owner" (steals?) and let it hot link to that for a while. I've known several photographers, authors, etc that have done that and the picture is removed in short order. Let your conscience be your guide.

[Rocky Sharwell]

You could also create a graphic that says something to the effect that "the person uses pictures without getting permission from the owner" (steals?) and let it hot link to that for a while. I've known several photographers, authors, etc that have done that and the picture is removed in short order. Let your conscience be your guide.

A years back I recall someone susbtituting an imaging of a cow pooping for an image that was hotlinked. I thought it was a riot...

[Arlon Motsch]

I'd have just been flattered that someone liked my picture enough to post it.. Not like it was some corporation stealing it for their logo. Some kid just liked your picture. Admit it would have been a nice touch if they at least would have mentioned whose it was.. Free advertisement..