Today I was notified that someone had stolen my pictures, this is the first time I’ve known of it to happen. The person who emailed me had several of her pictures displayed on this same site, but she asked if I could help in stopping the thief permanently. The site is full of images ripped from all over the place, the copyright information is clearly visible in most of them! I was told that even the horoscopes that this person is posting on the blog are ripped from another site. Apparently, no original thoughts in his head… Anyway, I found that my image was hotlinked directly from my site, so the fastest way to stop this unauthorised use was to use .htaccess.

This is what it looked like before:

And this is with hotlinking blocked:

If you’re a photographer, maybe you want to check the site yourself… at the moment of posting this, my image (or the warning) is on linked page but it’s a blog so the page number may change in time.

Although I’m taking measures to stop this, it doesn’t mean that I’m really terribly worried. I don’t make money with photography so somebody using my pictures without permission is not ripping me off financially – it’s just ripping off, period. It’s the principle of it that bugs me, if someone asked me if they could use my images non-commercially, I’d most likely permit them to do it. But using without permission, I’m offended.

I read an article today where they speculated that filesharing is so common these days that people don’t understand anymore what intellectual property really is. So even though they hear everywhere in the media that downloading music and movies and software is illegal, their moral compass is so skewed by the ubiquity of filesharing that they don’t consider they’re doing anything wrong. But you know what? Just because everybody is doing it, it doesn’t make it right. Now I’ve experienced first hand what it feels like to be at the losing end of copyright infringement, and I can’t say I enjoyed it much. Revenge however, that was sweet…