Stolen Pictures!

Let me put forth a situation and see what you think of it…
Let’s say you took a picture of something around your home, you like the picture so you put it up on a photo site like PhotoBucket or Flickr.
While you don’t mind other people taking a look at this picture, it’s still your picture and you don’t want others to steal it from you.

And then one day you’re cruising the internet and see your picture being used on someone’s website.
“Hey,” you think, “that’s my picture, I didn’t give those guys permission to use it!”

That’s the situation we’ve recently run into.

Fayme takes pictures of me building arrows once in awhile and puts them up on her Flickr site where they may be enjoyed by interested parties.

I was doing a Google search recently to try to find a picture of a particular fletching jig when I ran across pictures of my fletching jig table on sites I’d never heard of. Whoever owns or writes for these sites apparently found Fayme’s pictures on Flickr and have stolen them for their own purposes. We’ve written to the administration of the sites and have had varied success in getting the pictures removed: one site did remove it, another site returned our email, apologized for the error, tried to justify it, and then said he’d take it down when he was able to since he’s recovering from cancer. Somehow I feel that excuse is a little lacking. He probably spent more time on the email than he would have just removing the picture. The other four sites have done nothing and have ignored our emails.

Because I think a bad dog should be called a bad dog, here are the sites continuing to use Fayme’s photos without her permission:

http://www.customarcheryarrows.info/arrow-fletching-jig/
Update, December 28: The image was removed after the hosting company was contacted... Hurray!

http://www.satirica.net/arrow-fletching-jig/
(Said he'd remove it but hasn't yet)

http://www.iawgcp.com/fletching-jig/

http://www.outdoorarchery.info/fletching-jig/

http://www.bigcountryoutdoors.biz/fletching-jig/

You may notice that these sites give the appearance of trying to teach but really fall short of that goal, being rife with misspellings, poor sentences, and generally just pretty crappy, as well as chock full of ads.

Since the site administrators have been ignoring our emails, the next step is to notify their hosting companies that the sites are using copyrighted material without permission and are apparently refusing to remove these materials. Maybe that will work. If it doesn’t, I guess we’ll have to get a lawyer to write a nasty letter and go from there. I wonder what kind of damages can be collected?

For the record, because someone is bound to ask, every picture I have on any of my blogs were either taken by me or by Fayme, who has given me permission to use them. In the rare case that I have used a picture taken by someone else, I have received explicit permission to show that picture on the blog, and if anyone ever changes their mind, just let me know and it will be removed immediately, no hard feelings at all.

Thanks for reading!