Hi,

My first post here.

While searching for my name on google, I found some of my pictures credited to someone else. By following the link, I arrived on Fotolia and found 18 of my pictures sold by another contributor there 

I've already sent a feedback to Fotolia's admins, but as I have also recognized some pictures of other photographers I know, I just wanted to pass the info so you can check if some of your pictures have been robbed too.

Here's the link to the robber's portfolio :
http://www.fotolia.fr/p/147558

All the best
Erick

WOW!! thanks for the heads up, he has 36 of mine

I guess that mine weren't good enough to steal!

Quote from: stevemc on September 28, 2006, 23:12
WOW!! thanks for the heads up, he has 36 of mine

You're welcome.
Steve, are you the author of the nice "blue eye" ? When I saw this one on the fake porfolio, I was sure I already knew this shot.

Erick

Yes that is mine, thanks Erick.

Don't worry we will take care of this immediately.

Chad Bridwell
Fotolia.com

Thank you Chad.

Thanks Chad !

Of course, I didn't intend to blame Fotolia in any way for this issue. I think it could have happen anywhere else.

Erick

Chad, he has some of mine too. Do you need the #s?

Thanks Erick for letting me know. He has 32 of my images there !

If he had one of mine I'd want to get his name and information so I could sue him for copyright infringement!

He's from Latvia. Go for it.

How do you know he's from Latvia?

Coincidentally, I noticed Galastock is owned by someone in Latvia - go to their contact us form, it shows the address.

Just curious, all those with stolen images, did you submit to Galastock?

Someone posted a link to a link to this thread on another forum and thought I would check it out.  And one of my pics was there! And it was one also submitted to galastock.  But is also in my fotolia portfolio, too.  Here are the links.

http://www.fotolia.com/id/1297955
http://www.fotolia.fr/id/1332001

As you can imagine, I am very unhappy about this situation.

Any suggestions on how to respond and who to contact would be greatly appreciated.

Yep!  He had some of mine too.  I have the images on GalaStock also.  Wonder if there is a connection?  Shouldn't his account be disabled already?

The images he stole from me are on GalaStock, but have never been downloaded there.  Its strange, the images are some of my lowest downloaded anywhere.

What could clarify the whole thing very quickly is a statement from the Galastock owner confirming or not that this person had access to their internal files.  It should be easy.

I never joined GalaStock, and I don't have any stolen pictures.

Well, I checked the images he stole from me.  The only place I have had these images downloaded from is ShutterStock.  I have them other places, but they are new and have not received any downloads.  Can others who have had their images stolen look to see where they have been downloaded from?  I understand that this may be hard for some of the nicer images he stole.  The 2 images he stole from me are not my best, so I understand that they don't get many downloads.  This also leads me to believe that this is just some loser with no brain.  I have much better images he could have stolen, at least I think so.  I do not think this has something to do with GalaStock, but that is my 2 cents.

AreaPhotography, in the SS forum, mrslevite said said:

"It had to come from inside a stock agency because the image has never sold."
http://submit.shutterstock.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13055&highlight=

That's why I assumed that it was an internal theft.

Okay.  This has been going on for about half a day.  This person's portfolio is still up and running.  Why hasn't it been taken down?

None of the images are mine.  And, I don't submit to Galastock, for what it's worth.

Quote from: AreaPhotography on September 29, 2006, 04:59
Well, I checked the images he stole from me.  The only place I have had these images downloaded from is ShutterStock.  I have them other places, but they are new and have not received any downloads.  Can others who have had their images stolen look to see where they have been downloaded from?  I understand that this may be hard for some of the nicer images he stole.  The 2 images he stole from me are not my best, so I understand that they don't get many downloads.  This also leads me to believe that this is just some loser with no brain.  I have much better images he could have stolen, at least I think so.  I do not think this has something to do with GalaStock, but that is my 2 cents.

Hello, downloads doesn't matter. Galastock has access to all your images regardless if they were downloaded or not. You uploaded your images to them. The site is a scam, I could tell that in less than an hour's research and I warned about them before this even came up. I have over 2000 images on ShutterStock and not a single one turned up in this guys portfolio, ShutterStock is legit

Since I discovered my stolen images, I tried to investigate further and find a possible source for the "leaked" images. I was first reluctant to talk about Galastock as one possible source, having no real evidence of that fact. But after some search about the thief and after reading all of your posts here and on other fora, I have the bad feeling that Galastock is at least involved in the leak of those photos (wether culprit or not), for the following reasons :

- the stolen photos seem to have in common the fact that they have been submitted to Galastok recently
- one member had a stolen photo which has never sold anywhere (so the leak seems to have an internal source)
- a google search on the thief's name (Deniss Kolesnikovs) gave a few results showing that he seems to be a 21 yo student registered in a sports club in Riga, capital city of Latvia (if it's his real name of course)
- a whois search indicates that Galastock domain name is registered in... Riga, Latvia !!! (as indicated also on the contact form of GS website)

Well I can think of several scenarios, among which :

- the worst case would be that the thief is a Galastock's accomplice (in which case we should reconsider our uploading to GS and worry about all our submitted images)

- if we are inclined to give GS the benefit of the doubt, it could be that they employed some cheap student as reviewers to deal with the huge amount of submissions, and this guy has taken the opportunity to steal our images

- I could also be completely wrong and then you could call me paranoïd...

Anyway, I just checked on Fotolia, and the guy's portfolio is still online and has even grown from 182 to 203 photos since yesterday... 

Erick

[Edit] Oh, and I agree with AreaPhotography about the "loser with no brains". He even managed to submit my Japanese Piggybank image twice...

If you check out Galastocks owner it says it is owned by FOTKI.  In the US, FOTKI is a large photosharing site.  Has anyone checked if it is the same company that owns it.

I assumed it was like the ownership of Stokxpert where it is (part) owned by Corbis but StockXpert is based in Budapest (new country in the EU mcuh like Latvia)

Quote from: ErickN on September 28, 2006, 22:47

While searching for my name on google, I found some of my pictures credited to someone else.

How did you manage that, if I may ask? Weren't your stolen pictures under the robber's name? So why did they show up?

Quote from: Bateleur on September 29, 2006, 08:04
How did you manage that, if I may ask? Weren't your stolen pictures under the robber's name? So why did they show up?

One of google's results was a link to an image search engine page (http://es.inversible.info/search.php?q=paris&l=5&n=100) where I immediatly saw two thumbnails of my Parisian Metro Sign image side-by-side, one with my name under it, and the other with the thief's name.