We've all been there. You work hard to put up interesting photos every day. And then you're surfing along and there's one of your pics - on someone else's site.
In some cases, someone duplicating your work is fair use (examples include parody and critique - like all good things in life, it depends on context). But most of the time it's just your photo, decorating someone else's site. It's uncool. It's illegal. It happens.
I've been building websites for about ten years and this has happened to me too many times to count. I've tried everything from letters from lawyers (expensive, time-consuming, annoying) to ignoring it (nagging feeling of injustice, bottled anger, annoyance). Technological solutions backfire and email harassment only leads to high blood pressure. What to do?
After lots of trial and error, I've come up with a new approach, and I wanted to share.
Here's the stone cold fact: If you put images on the net, they will be stolen. Period. Copyright protects you in theory, but we all know there's nothing to stop someone from grabbing an image from your site and putting it on theirs (except, of course, for good manners and bad karma).
So the people who want to rip you off will always find a way to do so. So let's forget about them.
Then there are a lot of well-meaning folks with websites who have no clue how to use FTP or HTML. They'd give you a credit link, but they don't know how, or even that they should. These are the people we can help.
I created a little image widget on my site that gives the viewer a bit of HTML code which just creates a 250x250 mid-size version of one of my photos and links it back to the original. Now all a viewer has to do is copy and paste this code on to their site, and all their work is done. (You can see one in this very post.) Quick and easy.
I implemented this with a combination of Movable Type to manage the images, the MTImageEmbed plugin to generate the smaller jpegs, and a page that uses SSI to grab the image number out of the URL and format the code. But all of that is just tech details - it wouldn't be that hard to implement this in any photoblogging software. You just need to pull in the image's URL and SRC and plop the right code into a textarea somewhere.
The point is, this gives us a middleground in between fighting it and ignoring it. The image provider gets links in and appropriate credit, and the image poster gets a pretty image for their site without any hassle. Everybody wins.
This is just what I've come up with. It may not be right for everyone. But I just wanted to put the idea out there. I'd love to see others implement it, and maybe even push the idea further.
