Friday, January 23, 2015

How Does It Feel To Find Your Work Stolen?

I've read several posts for a few famous photographers/bloggers who found their images used without permission on other webpages. I sympathized with the cause, but I never knew how it felt ... until yesterday.

A friend of mine pointed me to a link on facebook, and I found the following:

The stolen photo

As you can see, the page owners STOLE my image from my 5D Mark II first impressions post, and used it to advertise for ... guess what ... a photography course. The astonishing thing for me is that I felt quite furious. I didn't think I'd be bothered that much, especially with a "small fry" page like this one, not that I am an important person or anything, but I did.

Anyway, I posted the comment you see above and sent it in a message, but I got no response. So today I filed an IP infrigment claim through facebook, and will wait and see what happens. I might as well give them a call.

The funny thing is that when I visited, I found that they state at the bottom of the page that "All copyrights are reserved - Graphics Academy 2014". So it seems at least they know of something called copyright ... at least their webpage designer does. I wonder if they teach people how to steal others' work. We'll see how it goes.

The copyright statement at the bottom right on their webpage
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6 comments:

  1. AnonymousJanuary 24, 2015 at 1:55 AM

    I know the feeling.. Have had a number of photo's used without permission, even commercially. I've tried getting some compensation out of it, but all people do is then just remove the image that they had to pay for.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. mshafikJanuary 24, 2015 at 3:13 AM

      The weird thing is they are not even responding or taking it down. I didn't ask for compensation.

      Delete
  2. AnonymousJanuary 30, 2015 at 4:55 AM

    Can't you sue them or something? I know here in Denmark where I'm from, it's quite easy. We got 2 kinds of "courts", well actually more, but two depending on the size of the claims. One "easy" court for cases under 50.000 DKK (~7.6k USD), and one above. Mostly when a photographer, copywriter or anything like sees his or her work stolen, they file through the small court. It doesn't require a lawyer, and it's cheap to start and run. Cost like 500 DKK (76 USD), so it's - for us anyway - an easy and nice way to get compensated for thiefs like that.

    Should you have such options in Egypt, I would recommend trying to go the way. Especially since they use it commercially, making money off of your work. I doubt they're gonna respond to your email.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. mshafikJanuary 30, 2015 at 5:08 AM

      I don't think courts here work in such cases, they usually work on real-life cases like theft, murder, etc... However I don't have enough knowledge in this area, so this is my guessing.

      But what I know for a fact is that these things take a long time and money too, so I am not motivated to take such action. And as you mentioned, they never responded back.

      The good news is that Facebook investigated the case and took down the offending material.

      Thanks for posting a reply.

      Delete
  3. AnonymousFebruary 7, 2015 at 11:51 PM

    Any reply or response from FACEBOOK?

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for your comment. It will be published as soon as we get a chance to review it, sorry for that, but we get lots of spam with malicious links.

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