Author Topic: Photo thief reselling on major agencies (Read 21279 times)

Microbius · « **Reply #50 on:** February 08, 2012, 04:32 »

Quote from: maxijuni0r on February 08, 2012, 04:08

Yeah, the dices are fine and a lot of people are using such things in their compositions but can't say the same about the other photos which are clearly altered ..

Agreed, but goes to show that we need to bear in mind that similar images may have the same allowable source rather than being copies of each other.

maxijuni0r · « **Reply #51 on:** February 08, 2012, 04:51 »

I agree with that

.
As ADOBE EULA's states : " you can use any of the files that come with Adobe programs in your own work as long as you don't sell them 1:1, i.e. do not use a unmodified symbol alone and sell it to clients."
Which of course, doesn't comply with first two images but the third one agrees with Adobe's EULA's....
Of course, this isn't our problem.

Renee · « **Reply #52 on:** May 14, 2012, 19:17 »

Quote from: sharpshot on August 18, 2011, 15:52

Nice that this person was caught but I wonder how many others are doing this? I would of thought the sites could use software to stop this happening. I hope they give any money earned to the copyright holder. This isn't nice for the buyers either, I presume their RF license is worthless if the copyright holder hasn't sold it?

Too Many, too too many. It drives me nuts

antistock · « **Reply #53 on:** May 15, 2012, 01:29 »

it's a lot worse than this.

as you see agencies are quick to shut down accounts with stolen or modified photos but in fact the thief gets no punishment, no jail, no invoices to pay, nothing, so what's exactly his risk ? near zero.

he can start over again with a new set of stolen pictures and he knows from the start that it will take a few months before being noticed, in the worst scenario he will still make some beer money from it with again zero risk.

as for those asking why agencies dont automatically check for duplicates, well it's not as easy and cheap as it seems, imagine alamy running a software like TinEye on its whole 30 million images archive, one photo at a time that's 30 million runups of software working on a whole data center and it cost a LOT of money ! and for what ? do you think they will start sueing image spammers one by one ? NOT gonna happen, ever, even if the stolen images have been sold.

your only chance is for instance to spot the stolen image being published somewhere with the thief's credit line, then emailing your agency and ask for a refund or something, good luck !

BaldricksTrousers · « **Reply #54 on:** May 15, 2012, 05:56 »

Quote from: RacePhoto on August 30, 2011, 12:58

By the way, is there a way to contact photographers at Fotolia? I tried to discuss the matter with Fotolia support, but apparently they don't care that one of their contributors is ripping other Fotolia contributors... They told me to file a DMCA complaint .

I notice that after almost a year Fotolia is the only leading microstock not to have pulled his porfolio. Why am I not at all surprised that they couldn't care less if they are keeping company with thieves?

Microbius · « **Reply #55 on:** May 16, 2012, 06:58 »

Not surprised either, Fotolia are also one of the few not to have shut down the portfolio of the notorious pkdinkar:
http://www.microstockgroup.com/istockphoto-com/istock-account-closed-please-help!/

http://www.fotolia.com/p/202069824
http://www.vectorstock.com/portfolio/pkdinkar
http://stockfresh.com/gallery/pkdinkar
http://www.123rf.com/portfolio/pkdinkar/1.html

ETA, not sure why MSG link isn't working, just do a search on this forum for pkdinkar

BaldricksTrousers · « **Reply #56 on:** May 16, 2012, 08:30 »

It seems that the only ways to get thrown off Fotolia are:
1) Say something negative about them
2) Ask for money they owe you
~~3) Steal photos and use Fotolia to fence them for you~~

Ooops! What on earth made me think number 3 would apply?