How do you deal with an uncredited photo?

So, I was thinking about Mary's Bar BQ tonight. I re-read my thread then googled it. Much to my surprise, I found a picture I had taken (on my phone camera, IIRC, but my flickr is definitely set to "all rights reserved") that was not attributed. It makes me wonder how many of the pics this fellow is using were lifted from LTH. What would you do? It's not an end of the world thing, but to find it on a commercial site is without the fellow asking permission is somewhat annoying.

My original post:
viewtopic.php?p=256039#p256039


Unattributed picture:
http://blogs.villagegreen.com/chicago/2 ... o-for-bbq/

If it were my pic, I'd email the guy and tell him he could continue to use the pic but only with attribution. By the looks of it, though, it seems this guy uses many pix taken by others without indicating the source.

I found an entire blog post of mine had been lifted and was being used, word for word and all the photos, to advertise toasters. I sent the site owner several emails starting with a polite request and following with a listing of my rights and a cease and desist. First I found that they used some kind of thesaurus program to change all the words in the content (fortunately rendering it useless) but I had to go back and remind them they had no right to use the photos.

Most of these folks aren't just bloggers looking for a photo to enhance their point, but are out to earn money off of advertising. You can report them to the advertisers (e.g. Google Adsense) for content theft - I've done the same a while back - but, unfortunately, it takes some time before Google processes the claim. You can go further and request that search engines ban the blog, so they can't make money off your content.

Here's a good article that outlines the process. I like the author's point that every person who goes after their content rights does a favor to all the people who let it slide.

Thanks very much for the advice. There was absolutely no direct contact info for this guy anywhere on the internet (he has a twitter, a FB and a linkedin, no email on any of them), so I contacted the registered email for the website and asked that they either take the photo down or provide attribution.

Ursiform wrote:Thanks very much for the advice. There was absolutely no direct contact info for this guy anywhere on the internet (he has a twitter, a FB and a linkedin, no email on any of them), so I contacted the registered email for the website and asked that they either take the photo down or provide attribution.

You could probably also put that request in a comment on the site.

Here's the contact info: http://www.villagegreen.com/Apartments/module/contact/

Mhays: this is a company that rents apartments. It's a bit more than a blog that aims to make money from advertisers.

They should have also taken a Honey 1 picture from here. The one they got is unappetizing.

Darren72 wrote:Here's the contact info: http://www.villagegreen.com/Apartments/module/contact/

Mhays: this is a company that rents apartments. It's a bit more than a blog that aims to make money from advertisers.

Yup - these are folks who should have an advertising budget and understand why they have to pay to use photos.