It seems that a number of people take the pictures I have in my image gallery and place them on their own websites. Some of these people simply hotlink to my gallery, meaning they load the image from my server, thus using my bandwidth without the image being viewed in the context I intend it. I don’t mind my pictures being viewed by others, of course, but what I do mind is people seeming to take credit for the pictures when they are mine. I take great pride in having taken some nice pictures. It brings a smile to my face when I download an image from my camera and find it has captured the scene exactly as I envisioned it. To have them appear on someone else’s site without my permission–or at the very least some acknowledgment–is frustrating. When one does this in a paper, it is called plagiarism and it can get people in a lot of trouble. So far, I know of two such cases:
- A sunset picture I took in New Zealand appears in this person’s personal weblog where the person mentions a love of sunsets. No credit is given to me.
- In what I perhaps find to be the worst example, some guy posts a picture of my drumset lit with Christmas lights with the message “its christmas time so light up ur drums.” He makes no attempt to mention the fact that the person in the photo is not him. It is obviously misleading some people, as one of the comments even says, “is that you??”
You will notice that on those pages, a copyright message appears on my images. This is thanks to the photo library program I use; it allows me to place a watermark on images that are hotlinked. However, I wonder, how many people have downloaded my pictures and placed them on their own websites for use without credit or permission? These are cases I cannot discover by looking through my access logs. Can I stop them from stealing my pictures? From what I can tell, I have a couple options:
- Use Javascript to prevent right clicks on images. First of all, I hate websites that do this, so I don’t think I’m about to do it myself. Secondly, any user can get around this by disabling Javascript
- Watermark all my pictures in the gallery. I find that watermarks on images can be very distracting and take away from a nice picture. Plus, I don’t want to “punish” all of those who view my pictures because of a few people who don’t care about my copyright. Ideally, I’d be able to watermark an image only when it is downloaded, but the software can’t do that.
There was a time when I was the kind of person who would just use any image I found on the web freely, figuring that anything I found through Google must be in the public domain. Now, I think I understand the frustration of people who want to share their art with the world, but find that using the internet to spread that art to a wider audience comes with a price. People can use my images whenever they want; all I am after is a mention of my name or a link to my website, indicating where the image came from. Am I overreacting here? Should I just be happy that people like my pictures enough to use them?