Possible Copyright Infringment Website

[Tell Dickinson]

Just to bring this to everyones attention - possible Copyright infringments at a web site called www.pixdaus.com.

There is a lot of unhappy people on another Nature Photography Forum (hope posting this link is ok)...

http://www.naturephotographers.net/imagecritique/bbs.cgi?a=vm&mr=51446&CGISESSID=2a24cefdf674b415af5073ff98aa0038&u=28444

...where people have seen their own pictures copied onto 'pixdaus' without their permission and perhaps people here may want to check out if any of their images are included.

I did a search for 'Arthur Morris' and found 1, I do not know if Art has given permission or not and I am just bringing this to everyone's attention 'Just In Case'.

Tell

[Roger Clark]

Interesting. I looked at a few pages and most images have no information on the image and never saw on copyright symbol. I wonder if they are removing those things or are selecting images that don't have a clear copyright. Out of perhaps a hundred images I look at, only 2 had names on them.

Photos on the web need 3 things: copyright symbol, name and contact info (like your web site).

Roger

[john j. henderson]

Indeed, they are stripping the copyright, here is one of my images; it had a proper copyright.

http://www.pixdaus.com/single.php?id=56077

I will take appropriate action to get it removed.

[Tom Walters]

I find it sickening that someone would go to the trouble of removing any marks of the real photographer, whether in the image of exif. Its just such an injustice that someone has taken the considerable effort to take the shot only for it to be stolen by someone else.

Even if the ones without credit receive positive comments, the original tog wont know unless they stumble upon it or keep searching for it through tineye etc.

:(

[Roger Clark]

From:
http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp

search for pixdaus.com


Registrant:
Chris Ingham Brooke
72-75 Red Lion Street, Holborn
Lion House
London WC1R 4NA
United Kingdom

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: PIXDAUS.COM
Created on: 26-Feb-08
Expires on: 26-Feb-19
Last Updated on: 13-Jul-09

Administrative Contact:
Ingham Brooke, Chris chris@environmentalgraffiti.com
72-75 Red Lion Street, Holborn
Lion House
London WC1R 4NA
United Kingdom
+44.0845880039 Fax --

Technical Contact:
Ingham Brooke, Chris chris@environmentalgraffiti.com
72-75 Red Lion Street, Holborn
Lion House
London WC1R 4NA
United Kingdom
+44.0845880039 Fax --

Domain servers in listed order:
NS51.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
NS52.DOMAINCONTROL.COM

plus the usual caveats about accuracy

I'm not sure how one would file a complaint in the UK on a US copyright infringement.

Roger

[john j. henderson]

I received a responce from the owners of the site within a couple hours of my demand to remove my image. The letter indicated they have removed the image and blocked the user that uploaded the image.

[Jeff Donald]

At the bottom of almost every page on their site is this notice/disclaimer

Disclaimer: Pixdaus.com is an environmental photo-bookmarking and sharing service. All the pictures are uploaded by users and the copyrights belong to the rightholders. If you find a photo that you think shouldn't be here, send a removal note to pixdaus@environmentalgraffiti.com

So it's easy enough to get them removed, but you'd have to hire an attorney to get the site shut down. A letter from a US attorney to GoDaddy might get the site removed from their servers, but they could just move the site to a host in Russia or another country that would ignore the legal action.

[Kerry Perkins]

Looks like the site is down. IP address is 66.90.103.79. It responds to pings, but no server is running as of this moment.

[Tell Dickinson]

The site is back up again now, but if I search for 'Arthur Morris' I now get nothing so do not know if Art has contacted them or they have taken some images down themselves. I do know that someone on the other photography site is contacting them today to try and get the site closed down and if I find out any more I will come back and post.

Tell

[Chris Ober]

The site isn't ripping them off...the submitters are. It's just like Reddit, Digg, etc...

On their about page:

Photographs are submitted to the site and then are voted on by users. If they're really good, they get promoted to the front page, where they get even more exposure. If users don't like the photo you posted and it is voted down, it gets buried.

If copyrighted or offensive photos occasionally slip through our nets, please click the flag-it button underneath the photo and we will remove it as soon as possible.

[Tell Dickinson]

The site isn't ripping them off...the submitters are. Hi Chris, I am not familiar with Copyright law but here are some comments from a lawyer who I believe deals with Copyright law on almost a daily basis...

"Of course given a breach of copyright has occured here"
"It's about as flagrant a breach of copyright scenario as you'll find."

and most damning...

"By allowing the image to be posted on the site, they are effectively publishing it and therefore just as guilty of breach of copyright as the original poster."

As I said I have no law knowledge and its up to individuals to to come to their own conclusion :-)

Tell

PS Arthur Morris's photograph is back on the site.

[Chris Ober]

I'm not denying there is copyright infringement involved, just who the infringing party is.

Yes, is a breach if they (the site) continue to allow it after being notified of the breach but there is no way, at the time of the posting, to police or know if it a image placed there is in violation of somebody's copyright.

It's not the site at fault for some jerk putting up photos they didn't take or acquired without permission unless they ignore or refuse to remove the content. By their terms and John's inquiry, they are abiding by that.

[Sari Kantinkoski]

Well, hello everyone! I found this forum while I was searchig information about mr. Brooke, and I noticed that you are dealing with the same problem! Last December 17 photographers from Finnish photoagency found their pictures copied and posted to the site... and so did phtographers of another agency. About 100 pictures, wich are now removed. I discovered that there are more than 140 000 pictures on that site, most of them are uploaded without any permission, and this site has been there for years, and some of the users are "picturehunters", who simply search photos all over internet, copy them and post them to the site. Pixdaus seems to benifit some commersial incomes from visitors on the site, how much -I don't know (yet).

But we decided to contact our photography organisations here in Finland... so far there's not much they can do. I gave a hint also to our national bureau of investigation... haven't got any response yet.

This is what users of pixdaus claim on their responses to photographers:

"Almost all pictures here on Pixdaus have been posted by people other than the photographers. We search for them all over the Internet"

"As your pictures already were on the Internet, available to ever tom, dick and harry, you have made them available to the whole world"

"Hello Melanie, thanks about my pictures, but this pic is not mine, I understand you can do whatever you want with it. I think it does not have copyright."

Interesting... ;)