Well, it's not really what we pay them for... is it?

It sucks, no doubt. But If you find out about it you have all right to make a claim.

Alamy won't hire their lawyer for a couple grand to look into this matter and harass someone over $50 of licensing costs.

They leave that up to us...

That's all they can do.

In the end it's even free advertising for the agency and kind of for your images as well. I know it's lame that people actually use watermarked (I guess they were watermarked) pictures. It doesn't look professional and those people wouldn't pay for the images in the first place either.

You can sue the heck out of them but it sure won't be the agency throwing themselves into the fire to fight the battle for you/us.

Our intellectual property, our right to make claims.

Our agents are there to sell licenses, not to pursue copyright infringements...
If you want that, you have to pay someone on top of that to do that for you.

Funny coincidence.

Yesterday morning I spent some time chasing up (or trying to) some images used in a "guest blog" in Scientific American online. Same sort of thing - the blog credits other blogs as the source of the images when those blogs are often doing the same thing. Even if the first person pays, I don't think that covers all the follow-on uses.

None of those were my images, but I have had something very similar happen with one of mine (licensed from iStock while I was exclusive).

Mother Earth News ran an article about dumping disposable plastic water bottles. The article used my image - which is great - and apparently lots of blogs picked this article up.

Via a Google image search on this I found this blog that reproduced the Mother Earth story and my picture - I can't know, but I assume they didn't pay for either (a credit is nice, but only if it comes with the cash)

Mark's Daily Apple does a blog post on choosing a safe water bottle and uses two of my images in it. No idea if those were paid for - they're both hosted on Photobucket, but that's where all the blog images are stored.

However that blog is picked up and used by CynergyCrossFit's blog, along with my images, now hosted on cynergtraining.com. Also on Wellsphere which uses the images linked back to the photobucket location.

Perhaps we just have to write some of this blog-copying as impossible to police. However Scientific American is a different matter IMO.

The fact that Scientific American (which does buy stock images and has used one of mine in the past) accepts a blog with images credited to other blog/online magazine sources and then just copies them to its servers, bothers me. The credits aren't even complete - for example the bottle with ingredients just links back to the magazine Blast, not to this page where the image actually appears. There, there is a credit to a Flickr which led me to the image here. This is a creative commons license that requires attribution, something the Scientific American blog didn't give.

The image that initially caught my eye was the bacteria cartoon. Perhaps someone knows who Don Smith is, but I couldn't find a source for that anywhere - tons of people using it, but no idea where it came from.

I think I'm going to contact Scientific American to complain even though none of these are my images. Just seems pretty shameful to be using these images improperly, blog, guest blog or in any other part of the publication.

No, I don't care about image abuse.

Sure, I wish it didn't happen.  I wish every case of someone stealing one of my images could be converted into a real sale.   But do I lose sleep over it?  No.  I consider it a reality and something one must have a stomach for if you expect to do much business in microstock.  

You can't expect agencies to police this.  I think 123's response is reasonable.  Think about it.  Someone goes to 123RF sees your watermarked image, copies it and puts it on a website.  It's the easiest form of theft there is, and there's virtually no way for 123RF to prevent it.  Do you expect 123RF to go to great lengths to prosecute these cases?  That's crazy.  And if you take it on yourself to go after the offender and find justice, you're wasting time.  That's time better spent generating new imagery.  

And someone else here said it... the silver lining is that other potential buyers of your image could see it and decide they want to legitimately buy it.  It probably doesn't happen that often, but it's possible.

I think the real danger here is making image theft the scapegoat to blame for why you're not making more money.  You're looking at returns that don't satisfy you and wondering why they're not higher.  Finding someone who has lifted one of your watermarked images suddenly becomes the answer!  If all those thieves weren't stealing your images, you'd be rich.  Don't waste your time and energy worrying about this.  Instead focus on improving your port with greater quality (marketable) and quantity.

No, I don't care about image abuse.

Sure, I wish it didn't happen.  I wish every case of someone stealing one of my images could be converted into a real sale.   But do I lose sleep over it?  No.  I consider it a reality and something one must have a stomach for if you expect to do much business in microstock.  

Nor do I. It's a fact most ppl steal stuff of the internet. Music, games, movies, porn, you name it;). What I'd want is to be payed for that image. It doesn't matter if it was only a tiny XS sale. Agencies could, I think should really make sure images can't be DLed at all, buyers have lightboxes for the purpose of storing/choosing images.

You can't expect agencies to police this.  I think 123's response is reasonable.  Think about it.  Someone goes to 123RF sees your watermarked image, copies it and puts it on a website.  It's the easiest form of theft there is, and there's virtually no way for 123RF to prevent it.  Do you expect 123RF to go to great lengths to prosecute these cases?  That's crazy.  And if you take it on yourself to go after the offender and find justice, you're wasting time.  That's time better spent generating new imagery.  

Of course it would be a waste of time for me, that's why I wrote them that short email and didn't even bother following the link they sent me.

I think the real danger here is making image theft the scapegoat to blame for why you're not making more money.  You're looking at returns that don't satisfy you and wondering why they're not higher.  Finding someone who has lifted one of your watermarked images suddenly becomes the answer!  If all those thieves weren't stealing your images, you'd be rich.  Don't waste your time and energy worrying about this.  Instead focus on improving your port with greater quality (marketable) and quantity.

Don't you quit your day job Dr. Phil. You suck at psychology either for feeling me up like that (trying to get the answers by making some absurd/blind thesis and measuring my response) or even worse, really being straightforward and thinking you know all of my reasons for sending that email and the whole story behind it.

The distinction I'd draw is that in the cases (I did a search to find the many forum threads over the years) mentioned as OK, there is a news service providing an article for a fee to subscribers. The licensed photo is a part of that article and the IS folks have said that the "reproduction" of the image as part of the article is akin to making copies of newspapers or brochures and allowed.

In the case where you have a blogger grabbing images from another blog, there's no service being offered, no fee being paid to use the "package" of article and image.

It seems that even if one reluctantly swallows the syndication usages, it shouldn't extend to any blogger who puts up a purchased image giving implicit permission to the world to copy the image.

Oops - corrected the typo.

I guess the bottom line is that I think some sort of extended license should be required if the article is to be syndicated. Perhaps it's a relatively low value EL (i.e. I get the idea that the lion's share of the value is created by the article, not the photos) compared to the right to sell the image on T shirts, but it should not be the same as a single use on a publication's own web site.

Then, for bloggers, they can buy the EL or make the people who want to copy their content license their own images (if they want to allow their article to be freely copied).

I did write to Scientific American - their usage didn't even get covered by the above - so I'll post here when/if I receive a reply from them.

The only thing that would make a difference would be if all the sites decided to hunt down and sue thieves and tell the world about it. If it entered the Internet mind that pinching pictures gets you sued there would probably be less theft and more sales.

Like Getty have been doing, Gaw bless 'em!