MicrostockGroup

I found a lot of our pictures available free on http://www.freegreatpicture.com!

6 only on this page : http://www.freegreatpicture.com/animal/20

There are thousands of stolen photos of many mycrostock contritors (iStock, Shutterstock, Fotolia, etc etc....), but also of some photographers such as Andrew Zuckerman.

We will contact today the owner, the hoster and the company where the domain name is registered.

YOU can do the same:

* Owner: Trong, Bang

 Phone number : +84.974725779
 E-mail adress : [email protected]

 404/22 duong Tan Chanh Hiep 10, phuong T
 Ho Chi Minh, 08 84
 Vietnam

* The hoster https://www.doteasy.com/ContactUs/

* domain name is reggister at GoDaddy Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)

 Domain Name: FREEGREATPICTURE.COM
 Created on: 08-Apr-11
 Expires on: 08-Apr-12
 Last Updated on: 08-Apr-11

Thanks for posting. I checked most of the Food category and didn't see any I recognize, but there are lots of coffee photos.

Terms of Service link on their home page (at the very top right)- takes you to a page that includes the following paragraph:

"The images and resources that members and our collaborators published on http://www.freegreatdesign.com/ were was collected from many different sources. In addition to get permission from the copyright holder to post some pictures of them on our website, there are also many pictures that we not contact the copyright holder of the picture, or have the photos are shared for free on the internet that our collaborators has collected over the years.

So we do not assume any liability when people use photos, resources are posted on the website used for private purposes.

If you are the copyright holder of one (or some) images that were posted on our website, you may allow or do not agree. You should contact directly with us to be satisfactorily resolved."

They are blatantly taking and posting images without permission on their site and telling users that they do not have copyright on them (caveat emptor)!! Unbelievable. Somebody needs to write to them to tell them redistributing another person's work without explicit consent is NOT OKAY and it needs to stop immediately.

The site has a lot of advertising - I'm in Australia, and the adverts that appear here are for some major Australian food producers and retailers, banks, TV cooking show, etc.  If all else fails, I shall contact the advertisers and point out the copyright infringements.

good luck with it. It is Vietnam and I doubt anything will work. I know the area in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh) and I think it is near impossible to stop unless you get the site down. It will then reappear elsewhere. Rules mean little there unless the government imposes them. $100 a month is a great wage there but have good internet. They have incentive to pirate.

This site is running Google AdSense. None of the advertisers are advertising with this site specifically, probably. They are running ads in Google's network, and Google shows the ads. This basically means that you only have to convince Google that this site is a fraud, and the ads and income go away. Individual advertisers won't know what you're talking about.

Once Google confirmed illegal use on that web site they should drop that guy like a hot potato. Once he loses his Adsense account that's it, he won't ever get into Adsense ever again, unless he gets someone else to register under a different name with a different URL.

I've lodged an online Google AdSense DMCA complaint form (having just found out what that is...).  I suppose the more complaints they receive the better the chances of establishing a pattern of abuse.

A search of random images on the website using Google Images shows that a good proportion have links back to microstock sites.

The website removed an image of mine that I complained about.  They apologised, and gave this explanation of the copyright breach:  "Note: You should understand that we do not intentionally violate copyright. We will not steal your. The our bot crawlers collect from other sites, like google search. so there will be unwanted pictures."      

I guess by "unwanted pictures" they mean images in offered in breach of copyright, but they figure it's not their fault if they take these images from some other site offering them illegally??  Sheesh!

Lol.. how that images appeared in the internet??? noone will steal images from your computer, but if you just posted some images and someone then downloaded you from place you let to download from, so WHAT THE PROBLEM? post watermarks to your images, post bad quality images.. make something!! not just post it and then write that it was downloaded.. yes! it will be downloaded and copied! but who cares if you posted it to download???

I care. I posted my images on a legitimate (well, I guess that can sometimes be debated  ) microstock agency where YOU HAVE TO PAY TO DOWNLOAD the image. You don't get it for free. If you find a free, hi resolution image on the internet, and you grab it and offer it on your website (say, for instance, at wallpapersbuzz dot com,) and then offer it for download, you are illegally allowing the image to be re-distributed. It is irrelevant that the image is offered in a hundred other different places for free...they are ALL illegally offering it for download.

Just because you find it on the internet doesn't mean it isn't copyrighted. Some people seem to think that everything is FREE and have no problem stealing other people's property.

This is the most important thing to do whenever you find stolen work online.
Here's the DMCA notice page for AdSense websites, please everyone who finds their work stolen fill this in for the offending sites:
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=146178

ETA: It is also expressly against Google's AdSense policy to have their ads on a site that violates copyrights, so it is a good idea to also send a "The site violates AdSense program policies in other ways." complaint through the report link so you can let them know that it is a Warez site existing solely to distribute other people's copyright material.