Professional photographer Nasim Mansurov has had to deal with online image theft, so he put together this great article over at Photography Life to help all of us in the same situation.
There are different ways to react to an online theft, depending on what kind of site it is that is using your images. I would assume a private person on Instagram may not even realize there are such things as copyrights, whereas a website selling prints knows exactly what they’re doing when they’re stealing your image.
You should always consider these things before making up your mind on how to react to image theft. Sometimes a firm but polite e-mail is enough to have them remove your image from their site – if not, there are other ways you can protect your photography.
How to Deal With Image Theft
While litigation often seems like a good idea to deal with online theft, it is often a real pain to go through, especially for those who aren’t already familiar with the process. Finding and hiring a lawyer isn’t cheap and paying someone for something that might not yield anything at the end can be quite frustrating. Some people end up losing a lot of time and money, only to discover that the company they sued either went out of business, or can only pay for the photograph that was misused, without taking care of attorney fees.
Option One: Contact the Company / Individual / Webmaster First
Sometimes, instead of dealing with litigation directly, it is better to involve the website owners and then search engines to deal with theft. A website that stole your image(s) will typically have some sort of contact information that you can use to reach out. First, I am going to reach out to the website owner and ask them nicely to remove not only my images, but all other images that were taken without permission.
Option Two: Use DMCA Takedown Request
The way DMCA takedown requests work, is you initiate a request through a search engine, which in this case I am going to use Google. If you visit this page at Google, you will see quite a bit of information regarding legal removal requests. Once you go through all the information, you will eventually end up on this page, which is specifically created for such takedown requests.
What you do from here, is fill out all the information and submit it. Then you wait for Google to take action. Within a few weeks, you should have a decision from Google on your request.
Option Three: Litigation
If the two steps above fail and you got nowhere, perhaps it might be time to consider litigation. There are very rare cases where you actually want to pursue litigation as the first option. For example, if a large company stole your image and used it in a large advertising campaign, I would not contact the company or deal with DMCA takedown requests at all – I would immediately hire a good lawyer. If it is a large company with a lot of funds, you will get paid for damage and most likely recover all of your litigation costs. However, if you are dealing with a shady individual or a small company, you are almost always better off pursuing options #1 and #2.
Read the full article over at Photography Life.
Source: Photography Life
