What To Do If Someone Steals Your Photography
Like viral memes, cat videos and tweets from the President, image theft is endemic on the Internet. In a PhotoPlus Expo panel, photographers John Harrington and Jeff Sedlik laid out a number of useful strategies that photographers can take when their images are stolen. Both took pains to emphasize that they are not lawyers and their suggestions and strategies should not be construed as legal advice. Let us relay the same: your first and best recourse when someone steals your photos isn’t this article, it’s a lawyer. That said, there are steps photographers can take on their own should they encounter an image thief. THE SCALE OF THE PROBLEM Copyright theft is pervasive, Sedlik said. Even photographers actively searching for stolen images may only find about 5 percent of infringements. Using Google News alerts with your name as the search criteria and image-scanning services like ImageRights can help, but will still fall short, Sedlik said. For one thing, they can’t catch offl