Today I was emailed by a person related to the person my lawyer is going after for stealing one of my product photos. They gave me a sob story about how they didn’t understand why my lawyer was taking them to court and all of the tragedies in their life and how I was harassing a person who has done no wrong. They claimed the photo was put on the blog to “generate business” for my company.
They claimed to be confused how she was being targeted for this and that my lawyer was being predatory. All of this for trying to help promote my business.
After getting over the accusations and getting emotional, I thought well maybe they did give the company credit for the photo and in which case I am fine with that. Just need to make sure and I’ll tell the law firm to let it go. Then I felt bad that I wasted the lawyers time, and put this person through all of this.
Then I did some research. I looked at my active cases which is around 40. First one I found matched what they were talking about. I went to the offending webpage on their blog and it looked familiar as I had done this about 2 years ago. Then I went to the Wayback Machine and found 3 entries for that page. The first one showed a picture of my Bronx table that I took with my Nikon. The description mentions they love the style of Vintage Industrial which all the pictures are of. But that is not mentioning our company. And when you click on my Bronx pic it opens up larger, so no mention of us.
So I tell this person your facts are wrong, there is no credit given, just our photo. They said they took it off their site and didn’t gain monetarily for this. And they asked “what do you really want here”? I didn’t say it, but I want people to stop stealing our photos so I don’t have to go after them. I mean buddy, she is a realtor and blogging about design trying to drive traffic to her website. The traffic bring her clients and can make her money. But I replied “she stole our work, you lied about her giving us credit. Talk to our lawyer about that.”
Then they suddenly understood what was going on here. They thanked me for my time and said my business must not be doing very well to go after a stupid photo of a table. But wait buddy, you said your relative loved the table. Ok I guess you are just angry or upset, I get that. I too get pissed when I see people stealing my hard work for personal gain. The worst offenders in my opinion use my photo to sell an inferior copy of my product.
Here is a screenshot of my Copytrack dashboard. I use this service to go after international websites that steal my photos. Right now there are 5568 hits where a website has taken one or more of my photos. Some of these are legit, I am fine if I get credit. Many are spam sites with an anonymous owner. But a handful are companies that we can go after. Copytrack is a free service and you upload the images you want to protect. They scan the internet and alert you. Then you go through a process to change it into a claim which takes some time. Most of my claims probably never go anywhere. You can see it says I can make $654,797 Euros, but have only had $824 paid out.
I use Pixsy for enforcement in the United States. It works much like Copytrack, but not well for international. You can see I have 724 matches to go through. That would probably take me a days time. Also it’s pretty draining looking at all the websites that stole your work. So I usually do like 100 then quit for another day.
But this screen shows I’ve gone through 3,663 offending websites and submitted 37 claims. Of that 4 were paid out. If you take the time I spent doing this and the money I received, it’s maybe $5-10/hour. But if I let these people slide, it takes away from my business, and from my soul. I know people are going to copy my work, can’t stop that. But taking my photos is not the same. And taking the photo down is not remedying the situation. That’s like stealing candy from Walgreens, getting caught by the police, and saying here is the candy back now let me go because I don’t have it anymore.
For full transparency here, below is the email correspondence with this person. I redacted their name and email, my email, and some of their personal information.
