Full-text blog feedOutrun Sailing have Stolen My Photograph
I was just doing some Google Image searching, when I came across the website of Outrun Sailing. It seems they have used one of my photographs to create the top graphic of this page. The photograph in question is the sunset behind Langdale Pikes, which I have in the dawn & dusk section of my web gallery.
It's quite clearly my photograph they have used. I sent the owner of the small-time criminal company an email on the 7th of September:
(Not so) dear sir and madam,
I happened to notice that you have stolen (copied) my photograph of a sunset over Langdale Pikes on your website. (Google Image search is awfully useful, isn't it?) Since I have specifically written on my website ( http://david.naylor.se/ ) that commercial use of my photographs is forbidden unless an agreement (& payment) is made, I demand you remove it at once. If you would rather pay me for being allowed to use it, we could probably agree on a reasonable sum.
David Naylor
I have yet to receive a reply. So, if anyone wants to help me carry out a DDOS attack on these guys I would be very greatful :-) Heh. No, only kidding. But you could send them an email if you had a few minutes – that'd be great.
Update: Since I got no reply to my first email I sent another one, making it clear that I was serious about the matter:
Hello.
I was just wanting to let you know that the UK Police Force have an excellent online crime-reporting tool. Do you want to settle the photograph issue, or should I just report you to the police? It's your choice.
David Naylor
Apparently this was just what was needed to get some action from Bob at Outrun Sailing. As you can read in the comments below, the creators of the website claim to have gotten the photo from a website with Royalty Free
photos for anyone to use. I'm sure they're telling the truth, but obviously they need to choose their sources more carefully in the future. Also, these two emails apparently made up a stream of offending emails
. Heh. Anyway, the photo has now been removed and all is well that ends well.
Labels: photography
6 Comment(s):
At 11:44 AM,
Jack Lawrence said…
Hello David
I found your post when I was trying to find some opinions on Outrun sailing. I must agree, it definately looks like they did use your photograph. I was planning on using their services, but now I'm not so sure. I sent them an email anyway. Good luck!
Jack
At 3:11 PM,
David Naylor said…
Thanks for the help man. I very much appreciate it.
At 3:30 AM,
jer said…
at least they didn't direct link it. On second thought, too bad they didn't, you could have "gay watercolor batman"ed them.
At 5:43 AM,
David Naylor said…
ROTFLM*O. Haha. Yeah, that would've been nice.
At 12:12 AM,
Website Creator said…
Firstly, thanks for linking to Outrun Sailing. We would have returned the favour had we ever seen your website before your rather offensive stream of emails were received by our client.
The picture that you value so highly (which was obtained from an old "royalty free" site) has now been replaced. Shame really, we quite liked it.
Had you gone about things in a little more professional manner we may even have licensed the picture from you.
Now all that remains is for you to remove the litigious comments for your weblog and we can all go back about our business, which for us is creating websites.
At 10:29 PM,
David Naylor said…
> Firstly, thanks for linking to Outrun Sailing.
Well, I used the rel="nofollow" attribute, so they won't be getting any Google Juice(tm).
> We would have returned the favour had we ever seen your website before your rather offensive stream of emails were received by our client.
It was two emails.
The first email merely stated the facts. (That they were using my photo without my consent.) Since I got no reply to that one I sent Bob another, where I made it clear I was serious about this. (And that I was prepared to report him to the police.)
> The picture that you value so highly (which was obtained from an old "royalty free" site) has now been replaced.
I don't value it that highly. Not one of my better ones if you ask me. And I think you should choose your "royalty free" photo sources more carefully. (The one you used seems to deal with stolen goods.)
> Shame really, we quite liked it.
So do I. That's why I don't want other people using it without me getting any credit.
> Had you gone about things in a little more professional manner we may even have licensed the picture from you.
That was my suggestion in the first email, which apparently was one long "harassment". Well well, I don't suppose a small-time website like Bob's would have given any huge amounts of royalty for one photo anyway.
> Now all that remains is for you to remove the litigious comments for your weblog
Yes, I'll update the post with the fact that the photo has been removed.
> and we can all go back about our business, which for us is creating websites.
Great. And you might want to check your sources better in the future - maybe that way your clients won't have to receive "offensive streams of emails" from angry photographers.
David
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