A Useful Thing and Stealing

MY image of Ereka, near Newquay, 2009

The far-too-talented (and beautiful) Lara Jade posted information on her Twitter feed about something extremely useful for photographers. TinEye is a clever little site that uses advanced electrical machines and long sums to find other instances of your images on the interweb.

Why is this useful? Well, because as I found when I tried it with my image of Ereka, some folk like to take an image that is not theirs, clumsily remove the watermark and proceed to pass off the image as their own (and also try to sell prints of it).

I’ve known folk post other’s work on their sites before, but with an appropriate credit and usually some sort of permission is sought first. But when their posted with someone else’s copyright notice and the original one removed… well, that’s clearly an intent to rip-off the original artist (in this case, me).

People can, it seems, suck.