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Amazon seller image infringement


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Hi all,

 

Looking for some advice.  Doing a regular search for image infringements, I have found a seller on Amazon UK who is using one of my images to sell one of their products.  I am sending an email to Alamy this evening to check if the user is a buyer, as this image was licensed from Alamy a couple of years back (PU).

 

If it is not a license from Alamy, how would you proceed?  I can easily predict Amazon's reaction: 'nothing to do with us; third party seller; we'll ask them to remove the image; etc.  What route would you take: contact Amazon to complain and issue a takedown or proceed directly via Pixsy/imagerights or similar?

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Thanks, Mark.

 

Closer inspection reveals that it has been lifted from my personal website.  I have found the seller details from the Amazon website (I have also now found the image on a Middle-Eastern retail website, too).

 

If I have the energy (rare) I may well see if I can pursue solo, though I must confess to being a little 'shy' of contacting infringers directly. :(

 

Funnily enough, this is the same image that was previously infringed and secured a decent payout from Pixsy.

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10 minutes ago, Sally said:

I’ve just had a quick look at your website. You should be able to prevent copying by turning off the ability to right-click. 

 

How do you actually do that?  I am to tech what King Herod was to babysitting...

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On 9/5/2018 at 09:44, Sally said:

I’ve just had a quick look at your website. You should be able to prevent copying by turning off the ability to right-click. 

 

Thanks, Sally, but that's a PITA to implement on my site.

 

I use a Koken site, which was fantastic until it was sold (the original, brilliant developer - Todd Dominey - also developed SlideShowPro, equally groundbreaking, when Flash was a thing! He went on to work for MailChimp, another great service) Now, it seems that the current owners, NetObjects, just want to sell you stuff and are not interested in the product at all - they just wanted to do away with the competition. :ph34r:  I could meddle with the code just to drop in a simple script, but I'd have to remember to update all the necessary files, whenever I  - or the Koken system - updated anything else.  Far too much hassle for something (right-click disabling), that is so very easy to overcome! :(

 

On 9/5/2018 at 09:55, Colblimp said:

 

How do you actually do that?  I am to tech what King Herod was to babysitting...

 

:lol: Usually very straightforward, Andy - if you have easy access to your site files: https://www.google.com/search?q=disable+right+click

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43 minutes ago, Sally said:

I’ve just had a quick look at your website. You should be able to prevent copying by turning off the ability to right-click. 

 

In my experience disabling right click has no effect as the majority of infringers simply lift the images from Google where they found the image and never visit the originating site.

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4 minutes ago, Craig Joiner said:

 

In my experience disabling right click has no effect as the majority of infringers simply lift the images from Google where they found the image and never visit the originating site.

 

+1

You can override right-click in most browsers, in any case - or view the source file or view the image location via browser shortcuts or, or, or :rolleyes::huh::(

 

You can edit the robots.txt file in your site telling Google (and other search engines) not to visit or to not spider the folders containing your images, though it's hardly worth it, as it's not a law and will not prevent any search engine that chooses to ignore the rule.  And in any case, removing a search engine's ability to spider the site kinda removes the purpose of having a portfolio site in the first place. :D

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On 9/4/2018 at 19:42, spacecadet said:

Find the seller. If he's in the UK, try this.

http://www.epuk.org/opinion/stolen-photographs-what-to-do?pg=4

 

There's an updated article (Nov 2015), too, which includes a IPEC guide: The Infringement Pathway - A step by step guide for issuing a copyright claim, which I'm slowly working my way through before deciding whether to handle it myself or pass it over to a third party recovery service.

 

The most pertinent part of that article for me is this: "Do you have the resources, time, energy and above all the will to see it through with all the complications and annoyances?

If you don't have a full set of yeses then stop right here. Go for a walk, take someone to lunch. Don't even start. Give it to a recovery service or just walk away." :unsure:

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5 hours ago, Thomas Kyhn said:

 

In any case, people can always take a screenshot.

That is why I started watermarking images on my own site - people were just screenshotting, and that was even on images that were free to download (I wanted them to download so I could measure demand)

Shots on my site are now watermarked, right click is disabled and various other non-image related security is in place.  This does not make my images impossible to steal it just makes them harder than most peoples - and on a street of ten houses, a burglar will normally avoid the one with security the others don't have even if they do know how to circumvent it.

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