Hey guys, after lurking around here for quite some time now I finally decided to make a thread as I've recently discovered something quite disturbing. A few days ago I was surfing around and found this website where you can download thousands of stock images for free, these where photos from various sites such as istock and rf123 etc. I also noticed the network they were connected with that included 20+ sites that did the same thing.

Is there something that can be done about this? Would a report to some of the agencys make a difference? Apparently these website has been running for quite some time and it's really sad to see that many pictures being out there for free.

Regards

It's quality images and all the websites is in English so probably not what you think :S you can even search for specific categories and you get fresh stuff, kinda worrying.

Any chance of posting a link to that site so copyright owners can make a claim?

Most of us are already aware of them. All we can do is regularly visit those sites and check if we find one of ours so we can make a DMCA claim with the company that is hosting the files. Not much more we can do.

Someone please enlighten me - is the OP not posting a link to the site he found because that's considered legally risky, or because it's not allowed on this forum - or just because it's hard to be sure if the images are really stolen?

It would be indeed helpful to get the URLs here - even if they are chopped up so the search engines can't pick them up.