Your Images have been Stolen

It came to my attention today that the site <nofollow>p-o-l-y-v-o-r-e(dot)com</nofollow> (no dashes) has like a dozen of my pictures on their site.

So today I'm doing my monthly G Image search. You know my pic names (redhat.jpg) and I come across the above site that kind of condones the theft of my stuff.

They are taken our site images and letting users do what they want with them.

This may not seem like much to some but 1 of my images has been purchased for $250.00 and was featured on a music cd. So they could be taking money out of my pocket.

Do they have your images?

G needs to ban them!!!!

 

This is an authority site made by google, and seems to be well established.
it would be tough to do stuff against them. But consulting a lawyer may help you.

 

You can always send a DMCA to wherever their servers are located.

 

Do data centers usually respond favorably to such requests?

 

Thank you all for your replies.

I have not yet decided how I will deal with this theft. Oh I'm sure they would pull them if I email them about it. They cover this in there help files and trust me I can be persuasive. I've been known to change a stolen picture thats hotlinked to lets say up close pics of a mens privates etc. Not what you want when you have teens visiting your site..

If the site were to make my images link to the products I sell on my site, like they have done for others then maybe they can stay. Except here's where I have the problem. I've read, once they have made the new pic from a combo of our pics, they then have the rights to it. Let me think, ahh no.... I don't think so.

The real reason for this post is to find out how many webmasters have had there pics stolen by this site as well. It's not hard to check. Lets say you have a hat site. You can go to there site and search "hat" and see if your stuff is there as well.

They are even Bold enough to pull images straight from google images right into there site. These guys just totally disregard copyright laws.

If you google “there site copyright infringement” you'll see where flicker had problems with there actions as well. plus various other sites....

Anyway, thanks for your replies and go see if they have your pics as well.

 

They didn't even change the name of the file?

 

Nope not at all.

The way to check if your images have been stolen is to do a G image search for the exact file name. Which is how I originally found out they had ripped me off.

See if the have your pics... If you site has been around a few years chances are they have your pics.....

 

If you don't want to use hot link protection here's a trick to try <evil laugh>

in the .htaccess file:

rewriteEngine On
rewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://www\.blockwebsite\.com [NC]

RewriteRule !^block-me\.txt - [F]

Code (markup):

and the file block-me.txt can be whatever message you want to send them. (just text will do fine... no code necessary)

But I guess that will only buy you some time until they resort to scraping our sites and saving the images on their end.