How to protect my photos on the internet?

Hello people,

A few years ago I took this photo for a school project, I uploaded the original file to my PN gallery which I no longer use. Last week I saw this image displayed on a large plasma screen inside a restaurant in San Francisco! At first I thought it must be a similar photo someone else took, but upon close inspection I noticed that it was mine! There is a red hot pixel in the upper left corner in the original that was clearly visible on their screen too. I asked one of the waitresses if I could speak with the manager but she claimed he was unavailable, I left my phone number and email and explained to her that my photo was being displayed without my consent and even without my name or any credit. So far no phone call or email. I will go the restaurant again next week and hopefully get it straight with them if it is still on display. This isn't such a super photo anyways, but I'd rather have at least my name displayed on the photos that are taken from my website without my knowledge.

In the future if I have photos that are really worth something, what is the best way to protect them against internet theft? I already watermark the photos plus my name is embedded in EXIF but I guess these offer no real deterrence.


Thanks

Post them as small as you can. Check in Tineye.com once in while, although they don't cover 100% of the net yet.
And most important, register them with the US Library of Congress, you can do a whole DVD of small jpgs under "the works of Arash H 2010". You can find out the info on line, it's very inexpensive and it makes claims so much easier.

Arash - I upload images no larger than 800px to the internet, 2 semi-opaque watermarks w/o obstructing too much, and frequently lower the quality to around 90% in "save for web". theft-proof? prob not, but i'm pretty comfortable with that procedure for now.

At the small size we post they would only be good for web usage and can be tracked down with Tineye.com As Fabs suggested a good idea to check once in a while.

Arash, We all love sharing photos over the internet....but this is the other side of the pancake. Best to put out small images and limit the potential damage. With internet, there seems to be no real way of completely preventing it. Nothing will prevent some guy in some corner of the world download our photos and make greeting cards from it, right?

Fabs, thx for the tip on US library of congress. Looks like a must to-do item. Not that I consider my images worth stealing :-) ...but you never know.