Someone has stolen a bunch of Shutterstock images and put them into a Picasa album on the web. See here.

I clicked on my image (blond woman with a headset) and the full size image is there. There's no EXIF in the image, but the image name - shutterstock_1482912 - is the Shutterstock image number.

I have submitted a DMCA takedown notice. Others with Shutterstock images might want to check for theirs. This isn't new, but courtesy of Google's new image search, I just came across it.

He actually has "Shutterstock-Business" as his album title.  Did you contact Shutterstock?

Thanks for posting.

That seems like a pretty fast response to a DMCA.

Shutterstock's "infringement claims" replied to my support ticket this morning. Thank you..we take theft very seriously....

However, the whole album is now gone, so either SS got Picasa to do it or they did it on their own in the meantime (I didn't check back until today).

For yucks, I did a Picasa search for Shutterstock and there were 6390 results. Tons more albums with (from the looks of the few I checked) unwatermarked SS images available for download in contravention of the license. Over 7400 hits for a search for iStock (again, many appear to be collections of images to download illegally vs. a contributor's own portfolio album). Fotolia over 3100 hits.

It's depressing. Couldn't the agencies hire someone to do the searches and DMCA notices on this? Isn't that part of what they get paid to do? I realize they just don't care and don't want to spend any money to protect our images, but I think if the agencies got tougher with Flickr/Yahoo, Picasa/Google, perhaps they could slow this down if not stop it.

At least the thieves might make more effort to hide what they've done. They appear not to bother as they think there are no consequences for doing this.

It's possible they are just people collecting their "work" purchases in a Picasa album, but that seems somewhat unlikely to me. A few, perhaps, but so many?

My priority is getting the albums down, regardless of whether they're inadvertent or larcenous in intent. Even if it's the former, I'm sure people with no scruples will have found these and grabbed the images. And if it is inadvertence, perhaps the agencies need to put something very specific in the buyer sections, reminding buyers they can't put the full size image in pubicly accessible places.

It's possible they are just people collecting their "work" purchases in a Picasa album, but that seems somewhat unlikely to me. A few, perhaps, but so many?

Yes, I'm think they're putting albums together for coworkers or clients to look at, but they leave it wide open to abuse.  I can't imagine most people enjoy taking something they've spent money on, and consciously giving it away...

My priority is getting the albums down, regardless of whether they're inadvertent or larcenous in intent. Even if it's the former, I'm sure people with no scruples will have found these and grabbed the images. And if it is inadvertence, perhaps the agencies need to put something very specific in the buyer sections, reminding buyers they can't put the full size image in pubicly accessible places.

Yep.

I sent site mail to Contour99 and MariaPavlova as they each had a full size image in this album.

Useful title - Royalty Free Images. There's a ton of stock in there - you might all want to browse and see if you recognize any of yours.

In the case of the two I sent site mail on, I recognized them as recent free image of the week at iStock. I wonder if someone thought that made this OK??

Thanks for posting, JoAnne. I don't see any of mine, nor do I recognize any.