MicrostockGroup

What would you do if you discovered that someone copied one of your most popular images - and they even copied all of the keywords from your image (his keywords are exactly the same as mine), and the written description was almost exactly the same, too. I get so irritated with these thieves, and the laziness of this thief is especially disgusting, IMO. What would you do in this instance, would you complain to the agency? Would it do any good? Is there no limit to what these idiots can get away with?

You can bet everything that you own that I would report it!! 

Don't let them get away with it!

This happens every second day. Welcome in the club. There is nothing you can do in my opinion.

It is really difficult to tell when someone has stolen your idea...this topic has been discussed many times before. I know for a fact I NEVER surf a site, see a clever idea, and intentionally go shoot exactly the same thing. I am always shocked to see a photo of someone elses that looks just like mine. The first thing I think is that it was copied from me. Then I go check the upload dates and lo and behold, theirs has been submitted before mine!

With hundreds of thousands of people in the microstock shooting world now, it is going to be increasingly difficult to come up with an original idea. The only saving grace is that my props are not going to be exactly like anyone elses in the world (what are the chances of that?) and my lighting will not be exactly the same. It may look like I copied the idea, but I have not.

That being said, I understand, Alisa, that there ARE people who intentionally copy stuff. When the description and keywords are almost identical, I guess you can easily come to that conclusion. Unfortunately, all you can do is keep shooting and move on.

There are cliché concepts, but also, now and then, new and original, even rare, concepts. If one of those is succesful, you can bet it will be copied. Sometimes, you even can guess who will rip it off.

Inspiration = Okay
Replication = hang the mothers!

Christian,
this does hurt. However I'd take it as a compliment although it's quite lame to copy the shot.

Instead of just one woman sitting there he could have paid a local couple to lay in each others arms just to get a different feel.

This photographer didn't just start out and to take an existing shot and copying it means that you did something right!

Many people won't know about it, but for me, he lost some points

You should get in touch with that guy - it seems like you have a lot in common. Maybe together you become like a super-photographer-team or something.

To be honest I do think the example above is probably coincidental. They appear to be a husband and wife team who shoot similarly-themed stuff throughout their portfolio and naturally she has the outfits to go with it.

As far as framing the shot is concerned you almost have to place the background island close to the centre of the composition and, taking the shadows from the trees into account, there's only really one place she could sit. It is the most obvious and natural composition of that scene under those particular conditions.

It's more common than you might think to produce near identical images. I've several examples when neither photographer had seen the others work (for example because the image uploaded later had actually been captured months before being submitted).

Yours is better  LOL that's one the most weird thing I saw on microstock. Not even a different position !

Maho Bay does seems to be a well-known location as there are lots of images taken from a similar viewpoint on the internet;

http://www.worldofstock.com/slides/TCB1206.jpg

http://www.dcpanoramics.com/106.html

http://photos.travellerspoint.com/168527/maho.jpg

Maybe the other guy saw it on a postcard? You might get better sales if you were more specific with your keywords like 'St John' & 'Maho Bay' etc. If some resort operator or travel agent wanted shots of the local area then they might struggle to find yours.

I'm not talking about the beach itself. I have tons of images of Maho, I live here. It's probably the 5th best beach on St John, easy to get to, even the tour taxi's swing by. Find me an image with a girl on that beach in that same pose from that same angle.

That image has been in many travel mags and around the net for a couple of years, so it is possible he saw it there. Or maybe he took a peek at my port since I live here and he was planning a trip all the way from Hawaii. I know who he is and all the other beach guys, it's a pretty small genre. As far as keywords go, they are pretty much identical except he added a few. I choose not to name my beaches, I go back and forth with the pro's and con's. My point was shooting a single woman on the beach lying down doesn't play like it used to.

Just calling it how I see it. They do fantastic work by the way, print work is also very very good, not trying to take that away from them.

Well obviously, from knowing it was in the VI's, it only took me a couple of minutes to identify the location. You can ensure that many buyers won't see your images but you can't keep it secret from your serious competitors. We photographers have a great interest and memory for spectacular locations. Most landscape photographers could open any coffee-table book and name the majority of the locations without reading the text.

And yep, 'woman on beach' has probably been shot before and it'll probably happen again. Just like everything else. Any image/theme on microstock that rises up the rankings will be copied relentlessly unless it is sufficiently unique to make that difficult or impossible.