Lucky me, my stuff isn't good enough to steal. 
I haven't read everything in the thread, but it's been fun. For something else interesting people might try entering their name with the word photo after it (or you pseudo and photo after it) and see where your photos are being used. I did find one unauthorized use, but since it was SpeedTV and it's four years old, I look at it as free publicity. Checked my Micro Pseudo that I've started using and found one on PBS.org, which was funny. Here's a shot with one sale in two years and I found it?

Quote

I tried my name and photo and found nothing untoward. Annoyingly, the Google search has deteriorated recently, and one way is that if you search "John Doe" photo, after a page or two, "John Doe" isn't held together, and you get hits on photos of John Smith shooting a doe. (hypothetical example). As my surname is one spelling variant of a city, the search soon deteriorated - Shame on you Google, don't 'fix' what ain't broke.
Although my name is unusual, I have a namesake who is a serious investigative journalist in the USA (I'm so proud of her!) who shows up in a lot of searches!

On your second point, although with the new Google search, I can't find one of my flaming images, with sufficient XSm sales to imagine there must be a few on the web; even with TinEye, I found in-uses for two images that have only sold once each, and had no reason to imagine they weren't the actual sales.

[Off-topic] Is it EVER going to stop raining here. 

Hey, Cathy ~
You're in great company.
A lot of the pics on there have been lifted from National Geographic.

lobo has an account on MSG, but he's pieman. I have no idea who Vlad is, but I'd be surprised if lobo was operating two accounts here.

Agreed; but wouldn't it be hilarious/ironic if so? 

Quote from: sharpshot on June 18, 2011, 03:22

I think people became more wary about sharing music files online when bodies like the RIAA started taking legal action against them and it received lots of publicity.  I don't think we have anything like that but I think the sites should go after a few of the more blatant copyright infringers.  It should be quite straightforward when some of these people have watermarks on their images.  A few legal cases would receive publicity and I think that would do a lot more than us sending requests to individuals that are probably just going to remove the images at best.

Yes! We as individuals should not have to pursue infringers. That will not work. It should be the job of the microstock sites. With some of them taking up to 85% commissions from us, they should have money to get some IP lawyers and public relations people on this IMO.

Indeed the should, but that would eat into their highly prized short-term profitability, so it's not going to be high on their priority list.

Well I'm no rocket scientist but isn't the strategy for car manufacturers to attract the broadest buyer base possible by targeting their range of cars to varying demographics?  They don't crap on the "small buyers" and just target the heavy spend ones...mostly anyhow.  But even Mercedes and BMW have price points that span the breadth of consumer spending behavior.  I can't imagine that IS would isolate themselves like this unless they choose to squeeze the juice of life out of their business and close the doors.  Just sayin.

They want the plebs to go to Thinkstock, but of course the subscription model doesn't suit everyone.
Plus many pictures in the DollarBin are actually excellent quality, just fell foul of the best match at some point. But it's not easy to find the Dollar Bin if you're a newbie.
But 'spreading your offerings to different market sectors isn't used in all industries. Some target high spend users only, some budget buyers only.
My issue is that by not telling us, the contributors, what the Plan is (probably for business reasons, as was suggested the last time I mentioned this) it's not allowing us to make medium-term plans accordingly. E.g if the Plan is to dump all lower sellers, or all work from lower selling contributors onto Thinkstock, which I suspect, I'd be shooting/submitting more for Alamy.

What continues to be disturbing is the silence from Istock....almost admitting they could care less about bailing buyers. Very strange.

Looks more to me as though they couldn't care less.
I suspect they have got target buyers, with larger budgets.
If I go into Debenham's (or Macy's) with an own-brand budget, how much would the designer departments care if I said, "Yours are the only clothes that I like, but I can't afford them"?
The weird thing is that they (iStock, not Debenham's or Macy's) seem to be hiking up the prices to squeeze out small buyers, then offering the big buyers huge, unadvertised discounts.

How do I issue a DMCA notice on a site with no contact info?  
http://wallpapersnova.com

Registrant Info: (FAST-14069216)
  
   Tahir Qureshi
   2130, Street 33, Sector I-10/2
   Islamabad, Islamabad Capital Territory 44000
   Pakistan
   Phone: +92.3335580603
   Fax..:
   Email: [email protected]
   Last modified: 2009-11-19 12:37:40 GMT

Your DCMA notice won't have any effect outside the US.

Added:
You may have more luck via their host, however:
Technical Info: (FAST-12785240)
   Bluehost.com
   Bluehost Inc
   1958 South 950 East
   Provo, Utah 84604
   United States
   Phone: +1.8017659400
   Fax..: +1.8017651992
   Email: [email protected]
   Last modified: 2010-12-06 18:43:32 GMT

Quote from: ShadySue on June 17, 2011, 13:28

I just wondered what they would do/say to make that more likely.
The email I sent the two bloggers (using same pic copied from same magazine site):
Hello, Xxxxxxx,
 I see that you have one of my images on your website, credited 'House
Beautiful', by which I assume that you copied it from their site.
I have full copyright to, and own all rights on this photo, which you can license from iStockphoto,
http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-4515461-window-box.php?st=2065230.

Selling photos through agencies is how I earn my living.
However, since your blog is non-commercial, I'll hold off contacting iStock's compliance enforcement department,
to  give you time to purchase a license to use the file.

Thanks for your attention,

That's an excellent way of putting it. I always gave a choice, either take it down or purchase a license, but I like your approach better. No choice...buy a license. Thanks for posting that.  

That was my intention, but it didn't work. Both just removed the pics.

Quote from: ShadySue on June 17, 2011, 11:45

So, I have my second reply, an apology and a removal from her website, so two within a day. Better than CE can manage, as they had a backlog. It'll be interesting to see if they can 'convert' from an apology to a sale. If not, faster to do it myself.

I agree...faster to do yourself. But as pointed out by Holgs, if people think they are only going to get a slap on the wrist, they will likely do it again.

What else do they get from CE?

for iStock contributors, they've posted an admin update regarding this issue. I think exclusive iStock contributors in particular are better to send these issues through admin to handle communication. it seems already a number of people are going off half-cocked and contacting sites with images on them and I think in some cases it may be a honest mistake, or a customer who purchased a license. in cases where there is an infringement, I think it should be handled by those in the legal know.

I'd hate to see potential or current buyers turned off an agency because of interaction with an angry contributor.

Hmmm. We'll see.
Of the two I contacted yesterday (very mildly and before Joyze posted), both using the same image credited to 'House Beautiful', one has got back to me already, very apologetic and said it's a personal, non commercial blog (clearly true) and she can't pay for images and has taken the image down. She also mentioned she'd have to buy ten credits to get one pic costing, as she put it, 'somewhere between 2 and 5 credits'.
However, that's an immediate Result inasmuch as she has taken the pic down.

I'm finding very few of mine with iStock watermarks, and those I've found have been in forums, asking a question or illustrating a point. Like I said above, I have contacted CE about one forum with four watermarked images. Had a reply back from CE telling me that it would be dealt with in due time, when it came to its turn. Would someone pay for an illustrative image to go on a forum? We'll see. Is that considered 'fair use'? I've seen watermarked images on both the iStock forum and here. Maybe they're always images by the posting contributor. What about hotlinking? Years ago, I contacted CE about a hotlinked image of mine, and months later it was still hotlinked to (with the istock watermark) on the same site.

I can tell quite easily (as previous posts) that someone has copied an image from another site, e.g. if it's credited to another site (several instances), or in the case I mentioned, when the blogger said, "I don't know where this is, but it's really cool" (and invites people to download the pic from his site). On iStock, I have the location mentioned down to about 1/2 mile. Will this guy buy an image to put on his site when he can't invite people to download? I think he's probably a kid who doesn't know anything about stock agencies or copyright. I hardly think so, his whole site is like that: just collections of 'cool natural phenomena' that have caught his eye.
If there are a lot of uses with exactly the same crop and size, clearly most are copied from each other, but it would be more difficult for me to establish who legitimately bought the image. Again, many of these seem to be used in forums.

So, what's more important? He won't become a buyer, and all the time I'd wait for CE (weeks/months), people could be downloading the image to their heart's content, thinking it's OK. If I write to him directly, he might take it down today.

Much as it might surprise people here, most 'civvies' think you can download any images from the web, especially for personal/non-profit use. Even if they would never steal a photo from an agency and remove the watermark, if they found an image on a site with the invitation to download, they're probably not going to check whether that is a legitimate invitation. Even Google, gazillions of miles above TinEye as it is, doesn't record a fairly high proportion of my images as being on iStock, so even someone who went to that trouble wouldn't always know.

I'd certainly contact CE if it were a commercial use, but that would be more difficult unless it had a watermark - not likely to be credited to another site or 'I don't know what this is, but it's cool' - or no download shows. So far, I haven't found any of my 0 dl files in use, so I'm pretty sure that files in many cases are being 'lifted' from other sites.

I think that will be the end of imagery in Tennessee. I can hardly think of an image that wouldn't cause someone somewhere some sort of emotional distress, even a 'pretty flower' to someone with severe hay fever.

Without seeing the actual image, it's hard to advise. There are guys crying and guys crying ... and inspectors and inspectors.

I certainly wish there was some sort of note on the Google page about copyright issues. Especially since more than half of the searches don't seem to 'find' my image on iStock, so there's nothing to indicate that it's a stock photo.