Found one of my photos on this website: http://article.wn.com/view/2014/02/17/Vitamin_C_now_suggests_preventing_strokes/

Public Domain??? I sent them a notice that the image was for sale on all of my stock sites, and to please remove it. I called them but all I got was voice mail, and they haven't responded. Weird that they gave me credit, and then say it's free!

good one!

now I am wondering which agency have allowed this, hope not

I see that image everywhere, it's a great image. In fact, I purchased it several times when working for a company that did grocery store flyers. Your oranges looked better than the photos that were provided by the grocer.

If you Google danny smythe oranges you get all your agencies and even the photo in your flickr stream has "copyright protected" all over it. There is no way this could be an inadvertent use.

So I looked around their site a bit and they're using many photos they credit to AP, and I found this one credited to a Flickr user, but the user has this marked copyright All Rights Reserved, which I think means this site shouldn't have used it (I didn't see anything saying it was licensed via Getty)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/105060570@N03/11925460513/#in/set-72157639683255965
http://article.wn.com/view/2014/03/17/Catholic_Bishop_Who_Spent_Decades_in_Prison_Dies_in_Shanghai/

The other thing about these folks is that they are actively seeking advertising

http://wnnmedia.com/advertising.html

So this isn't just some blogger who doesn't know any better - they want to make money but don't, apparently, want to pay for their content.

I looked for a DMCA takedown link but couldn't find one. If you don't get a response, perhaps it's worth trying to kick up a fuss with some of their advertisers (they helpfully post a link to some of the bigger ones )

How can they label it public domain when they know the name of the copyright holder?  Weird.

  Thanks for all the research Jo Ann. This is one of my most stolen images. Back story is I joined PBase back in 2002 and posted all of my commissioned artwork as a means to showcase my portfolio to art directors. None of it was watermarked and the resolution was pretty high. I just didn't know. I had never heard of Microstock and didn't foresee that I could actually sell photos on the internet. As a result, this image was one of the casualties. So there are a few years that some of my photos floated around with no watermark, for anyone to just grab. But it is still theft.

Once I offered an image on Crestock in the so called "winter wallpaper" gallery. It was supposed to be on-line for that season. Then the Crestock changes came and the blog-like post remained on-line for years. My image has escaped in the wild and now I'm practically unable to manage the removal from all wallpaper-related sites.
Lessons learned:
- never ever ever ever give (or permit) and image for free if it's sold or it's intended to be sold commercially
- once a high-resolution image escapes it cannot be recovered. Just forget about and shot another
- the majority of people doesn't give a tick to licenses, copyright infringements, etc. They just download what is downloadable
- the naming of "Royalty-Free" sucks. It means Free. No matter that 100% of the agencies use it, it's still wrong. It should be One-time Royalty.

hi Danny

many thanks for your email and apologies from wn.com

WN have removed the image concerned from our Network.

I am not sure where the Public Domain listing came from, obviously it was wrong.


Regards,
Christos (WN Editor)

wn seem to republish articles-with-images from UK newspapers. I've seen my pics sold via Alamy there (not labelled PD, but credited), but I was never clear as to whether that was legit or not.
Thanks for this post - I'll know if I see anything again.

I'm willing to bet they purchased your photo from one of the partner program sites that uses "Public Domain" in its domain name, like http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/.  There's a few of them out there.