Blogs and Image Theft
How Web Blogs are Stealing Images and Website Content
There has been an exponential increase in website image theft and intellectual-property theft over the last few years, mainly coming for weblogs or blogs that justify the theft of your images "in the interest of spreading information" under the concept of "fair use." The unscrupulous Blog webmaster can also justify the image theft under the so-called "attractive nuisance doctrine."
Spam blogs may attempt to demonstrate "legitimacy" by placing a link back to your site, but they frequently use the rel="nofollow" link attribute which effectively denies your website any PageRank (PR) credit from Google. Flickr, owned by Yahoo, requires their users to use the rel="nofollow" link attribute for any outbound links.
There is nothing more frustrating than seeing your stolen images spread throughout the internet, and sometimes these spam blogs will out-Google your own website with your stolen images.
While there are many legitimate information blogs that genuinely serve a public interest, most are only out to make a buck off of your hard work. When they are a legitimate information blog, they will typically ask for permission to use your intellectual property, and/or include both a copyright notice, and a link back to your website. A blog should never remove a visible watermark, or alter your image in any way. Many spam blogs will get around your watermarking by cropping the image.
An example of foreign blogs such as this Korean website - tistory.com - that steal images and content to gain traffic
Many of these spam web blogs are little more than so-called "MFA" websites, meaning "Made For AdSense," and these blogs are stealing images to attract web surfers to their pages, thereby increasing their traffic, and generating clicks to their Google ads. Another growing problem is image theft by so-called "Zombie websites," which are expired domains that employ the MFA strategy. Additionally troubling is the fact that many of the offending MFA websites and blogs are located or hosted in foreign countries, outside of the U.S. legal jurisdiction.
When dealing with an overseas website that steals images, there can be language difficulties in notifying the offending website owner of copyright infringment, and the sleazier blog owners will also use the "language issue" to plead ignorance. The internet has become the wild-west, and copyright infringement by the bloggers has become a global epidemic.
Identifying Your Stolen Website Content
You should do a monthly search using both a Google web search, and Google Images search, searching with keywords that best describe your images. Once you have located a stolen image, or stolen content you must report the theft as soon as possible, because these spam blogs also steal from eachother. The longer your image remains on a blog, the more it will proliferate throughout the internet. Under a new "Orphan Works" bill that Congress is soon to pass, your unidentified images and copyrighted works could eventually work their way into the public domain, simply because there is no way to identify their original creator.
Preventing Image Theft from Blogs that Steal Content
Once you have identified a blog or website that has stolen your images, photos, illustrations, text, or other intellectual property, you will want to report the image theft to the website owner, and their web hosting service.
Since the spam blogger's main source of revenue comes from their position in the Google SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages), you will want to file a DMCA Complaint (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) with Google, to have them removed from the relevant search results.
You may want to disable the Internet Explorer image toolbar that would automatically pop up when the viewer's cursor hovers over your image. You will need to place the following code into the "head" tag of each HTML page:
<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no">
You can also include a JavaScript called a 'no right click' script, that prevents right-clicking your image to "Save As." For browsers that don't support Javascript, place the code shown below into the "Body" tag of your HTML Page. Note: This code does not prevent someone from dragging your image to their desktop.
<body onContextMenu="return false">
No system is perfect, and to make matters worse, a copy of your image is typically saved in the user's browser cache. Additionally, an industrious thief can simply take a screenshot of your page using the 'alt + print screen' command (Windows), or 'Command>Shift>3' (Mac), then recreate a new image file from the screenshot image. Unfortunately, this method will strip out all meta data within the image's 'File Info,' but it will not remove a visible watermark.
Watermarking Your Images to Prevent Theft
The best way to prevent image theft is to watermark the image with your web address, placing the watermark over complex parts of the image to prevent removal. It is also very important to put your copyright and contact information into the meta data of the image, using "File Info" in Photoshop (File>File Info from the upper menu-bar).
Watermark your image content in the meta data. This image was stolen, but it still contains the copyright data in its File Info.
You can also use a third-party digital watermarking service such as Digimarc, to encode your images, but resizing and cropping of the image can destroy the digital watermark. Another problem is images that have a lot of white area, as there are not enough pixels to make the digital watermark function without screwing up the look of the image.
Adding a Copyright Notice
It is also a good idea to add a 'Copyright Notice' to the bottom of your HTML page, but I can tell you from firsthand experience that this will be totally ignored by unscrupulous blog and website owners.
Fair Use as Image Theft
Many blogs fall back on the concept of "Fair Use," which gives news-oriented websites the limited right to re-publish images and text in the furtherance of "decimating information," and increasing "public awarness." Although this is certainly a legitimate reason to use a company's logo or product image to promote awareness of that company, it does not grant a wholesale license to steal multiple images and text, repackaging them as their own. When known, or knowable, the creator of a photographic work, illustration, body of text, or other intellectual-property should always be identified and credited.
Image Theft by Framing & Hotlinking
Another technique that some websites will employ is to use inline framing to display your web page within their page. Although they are not actually copying your files and text, they are sucking up bandwidth, and Googling with your keywords. Hotlinking is when a blog links to a single image URL, and not a whole page. This gives them the benefit of displaying your image, without actually stealing it. Hotlinking is also known as "bandwidth theft."
On To:
Reporting Image Theft
Filing a DMCA Complaint
Copyright Infringement by Flickr
Additional Resources on Copyright Infringement & Image Theft:
Preventing Image Theft from Blogs
WHOIS Search
Infringement Notification
Digital Millennium Copyright Act Notification
Report a Spam Result
Digimarc Digital Watermarking
Fair Use
Orphan Works
Wikipedia: Public Domain
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