Is It Stealing To Use Another's Background Image? It Is A Wood Table.

[Sharon_U]

I sell handcrafted jewelry on a website and also the jewelry-making components on another (that is OsCommerce). I discovered that a friend of mine has used the background image from my photographs for her photographs. Here is the gray line... the background is an old distressed wood table that is in my backyard. It is not my art or original creation per say, nevertheless it is a distinctive characteristic of my photographs.

 

I sent her an email to say - Can this be my table? - But do I really have a leg to stand on? Is this stealing?

 

Interested in seeing an example? -let me know and I will provide it. I'm hoping I can get some input from someone wise who has sifted through more legal stuff than I. Thanks in advance!!

 

Sharon

[Guest]

Hi Sharon,

 

Let's say, for example, that someone sees one of their pictures used on your website. They can prove that it is, indeed, their picture. They own the copyright on it. They can make a demand that you prove that you have legally acquired the right to use the picture. If you can't prove it (usually in the form of a paid invoice) you're in big trouble. Very big. By way of illustration, here is a quote form one of my forums...

 

I am one of many people who during the last few months have received "invoices" from Getty and Corbis (stock image companies) for infringement of copyright. I do web design and in my case I had a small graphic/icon on my site that they owned. I have used thousands of images over the years and in this case I cannot remember where I got it. All I do know is that I did not get it from Corbis's website.

 

I received an invoice from a law firm representing them a couple of months ago demanding that I pay almost £2,400 for the use of this image. I have not yet paid but I have been threatened with all sorts of legal action if I don't. They are perfectly within their rights to pursue people who infringe in this way and I do not dispute this, but to ask for £2400 for the use of a shopping cart icon smacks of legalised extortion.

 

My research since then has shown that thousands of people throughout the world have received similar demands. Some for as much as £30,000. On another website I also noticed a reference to legal advice on this subject being dispensed by the FSB legal website. I contacted them and the person I spoke to had heard nothing about it. I was just wondering if anyone in here is in the same situation as myself?

 

Incidentally I do not condone image theft. I would not knowingly use images that are copyrighted on any of my work but this situation forced me to go through all of the work I had done during the last five years in case there were any other images on my clients sites that I could not account for. This has taken me almost four weeks. Anyone who is doing web design work please take note.

 

Businesses should note that they (not their web designer) are responsible for the content on their websites. Many small businesses have already received these frightening demands. Anyone who has any doubts about this should ask their web designers to confirm that all of the images they used are legal...

 

In short, "Intellectual property" or copyright refers to original creations in the fields of literature and the arts. Most countries in the world provide automatic copyright protection to any item of intellectual property at the instant the item is created. At the instant a photo is taken, it automatically becomes the "intellectual property" of the photographer who took it. It makes no difference what the subject is or why the photograph was taken.

 

Hope this helps

 

David

[Guest]

...... that a friend of mine .............

 

You can have NO friend, or have a friend with No imagination of their own. Or just take another picture that you think might be more suitable for their site.

[UncleSteve]

I quite often come across sites that are using images off my site, sometimes they haven't even bothered to load them on to their webspace, they draw the image (and usually the associated text) via a link back to mine (just look through your sites logs for re-occurring hits to the same IP). In these cases I edit the image to put my website address across the image, so anyone viewing the competitors site, will see my URL on their images! With the original image on my site, I simple load the original image with a new name and edit the page to show the clean image.

 

Where they have simply nicked the image, I have contacted them to remove the image, which has worked so far.

 

I now tend to put a fine water mark of my sites name across the image.

 

Users of eBay are the biggest culprits of image and text theft from my site

[Guest]

I quite often come across sites that are using images off my site, sometimes they haven't even bothered to load them on to their webspace, they draw the image (and usually the associated text) via a link back to mine (just look through your sites logs for re-occurring hits to the same IP). In these cases I edit the image to put my website address across the image, so anyone viewing the competitors site, will see my URL on their images! With the original image on my site, I simple load the original image with a new name and edit the page to show the clean image.

 

Where they have simply nicked the image, I have contacted them to remove the image, which has worked so far.

 

I now tend to put a fine water mark of my sites name across the image.

 

Users of eBay are the biggest culprits of image and text theft from my site

 

Thats because most ebay users do not know that there is even such a thing of copyright for images on the net, nor do they even care if there was such an act. They go on there to sell their stuff, and it COULD be someone who may know html or it could be someone who is trying to see their electric supercharge for a car.

 

When it comes to ebay, they dont care. Most of them would not have space to host any images anyways.

[♥Vger]

If someone is 'hotlinking' images from your website for loading on their own then this is 'bandwidth theft' - and it's just like any other kind of 'theft' - it's a criminal act and not just civil.

 

If it's also an image of which you have the copyright then it's a double whammy.

 

Way back in the days when I first started out on the internet I had a hobby site (no time for that now) and found someone hotlinking one of my images. I resaved the image under a different name and changed the link on the site to the new image name, and then changed the original image to read "This image stolen from [site name]". I waited two days and then reported them to their hosting company and got their account suspended.

 

Of course you could just ban hotlinking by the use of .htaccess - but it can be more fun for them to have an image on their site which tells their customers that they stole it.

 

As for images on your own site - istockphoto.com - starting at $1 and royalty free.

 

Vger