Question about my photo use by myspace.com members?
 

Well, when I look at my site statistics I see about 30 links to a specific photograph on my website (http://www.danwiz.com/Dec2005/Mitake...AW_11_1024.jpg) from myspace.com members. My question is: where are these people finding this particular photo? I have looked all around the myspace home page and I do not see any special links to good fall color photos or anything, so where are all of these people finding the availability to this photo? Next question: What would you recommend, although this photo is signed by me, it does not include the copyright symbol, so are these people infringing on my rights in any way? And, of course they do not specifically credit me with the photo, in fact you don't know that it comes from my site unless you look at the source code.

So, what would you recommend? I can think of one easy solution if you tell me that they are infringing on my rights, I can replace the jpg image with a pdf image, that would prohibit them from having my photo appear in their myspace pages. If you look at the particular page where they are getting the photo from (http://danwiz.com/Special_Items.html) you will see that many of the photos I have posted there are in pdf format.

Or, should I somehow consider it good advertising for my site and leave it as it is.

Thanks in advance.

danwiz

They are probably finding the picture by Googling. I noticed the filename has "fallcolor" as part of it. Changing filenames to something more obscure might help in the future.

As to what to do now, I guess it's all up to how you feel. Do you earn money off your photos? You might want to start doing the copyright thing. I'm not sure what rights you have without it. Maybe it's time to look into it.

You could always email the people and ask either to give you credit or remove the picture. Please be nice about it :) If they refuse, replace the jpg with a pdf.

Oh, nice picture. I recently got a camera that shoots RAW, so I'll be experimenting with that soon.

I vote for replacing the photo with one that would be embarassing to the leechers. Just call it exactly the same name, keep the size the same. Rename the original to something else and use THAT on your site.

sracer and I think alike.

Using .htaccess to protect from hotlinking.

I would suggest image replacement with tub girl or a goat, see.

Just upload this pic to the same directory with the same filename. Problem solved.

Thanks for your suggestions on what to do. You're right - they probably find it by Googling - when I go to google and type in "fall color raw" and click on images, the aforementioned image is the very first one on the page. If I just type in "fall color" it is still on the first page of images. Well, now I have to decide what to do. Thanks again.

Any photo you produce is automatically copyrighted to you, with or without a symbol. However if they're hotlinking the picture from your site, there's no copyright infringement as there's no copying on their part -- the picture is on your server, and whoever views the MySpace pages is viewing your copy of the photo. Hotlinking is bad not because it's infringement, but because some douche is using your bandwidth for their own site. If your site is operating near your bandwidth cap, you'd actually be better off if these people hosted their own copies.

More fundamentally, though, this is what happens when you place a picture on a website -- you have no control over what happens to it after that. If you don't want people taking your pictures and placing it on their own site, you shouldn't upload them to a publicly accessible webpage. About all you can do is slap a Creative Commons license on your site, placing limitations on what you'll allow -- no derivatives, no commercial use.

By the way, Danwiz, I notice you have this disclaimer on your page:

You should never do this. Always design a page to be W3C standards compliant, that way it'll display correctly on any browser using any sized screen. Assuming that everyone will view your site using the same sized monitor and the same browser is just going to alienate the 90% of users who aren't using IE on a 1024x768 screen.

Thanks Sean O'Hara, I have removed that disclaimer from all future web pages, although I'm not going to go back and edit every page on the site to get rid of the offending disclaimer.

I had this same kind of problem, but it was a facebook user.. so I created this monstrosity (I have hidden it for this post with a spoiler tag, cause it's a bright red line, 1 pixel wide x 30,000 high. Be careful if you click that spoiler button!):



It really messed up that person's facebook page, and they stopped leeching off my bandwidth real fast.

:rock: