Re: Image theft - mosaic and glass crafters take note

Quite true. I don't believe I suggested otherwise. But as I said, if you do catch someone doing this, you have the recourse of switching out the photo that was appropriated for a warning about the thief's behavior. And if we as a community keep an eye out for sites like this, we can at least keep the profit they may make at a minimum.

M.

A WHOIS lookup of the domain name yeilds this contact information:

Registrant: Mohamed Abdel Rahman ( snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com) netinvest

53 Lebanon Street, Mohandesin, Giza Cairo, 0058 EG +20123134061

It was my understanding that many countries respect the copyrights of other nations. I don't know the particular case for Egypt.

Usually image pirates will download the images to their own servers. Linking to your servers is not only image theft, but BANDWIDTH theft as well, and you are paying for that out of your own bandwidth allowance. I think you can take this up with not only your ISP, but their ISP as well.

Good luck.

-Wendy of NJ

Mel> Forgive the crosspost, please. If you make mosaics or stained glass, and

do a right click on the image, and look at the properties. you can see the real path of the image. shoot an email to all the involved parties.

In needlework the same sort of things goes on. There is a useful yahoogroup you might want to subscribe to learn more about fighting copyright theft:

Lady

The internet is a hierarchy of servers. Sometimes the server servicing another countries server is in the US and can be persuaded to protest to the offending server. That server admin will get in touch with the next one down the line until the server actually hosting the offending web site drops the customer. Yahoo would be a good place to start since the admin of the offending site is Mohamed Abdel Rahman ( snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com)

My husband emailed me this snippet to stop bandwidth piracy.

Replace YOURDOMAIN with your own domain name in the .htaccess file.

P.S. I have not tested this code yet so I cannot confirm its validity.

Stitch Lady

Actually you can, but it requires advanced scripting. What you do is use a php or CGI script to check the HTTP referrer of the image, and if it's your website, display the image. If it is NOT your website, display a warning (or some other picture, use your imagination :)).> Sorry, but that's the way the ball bounces in the 21st century... There are ways to technically protect your work.

-Tony

While there are scripts out there that purport to "disable" the right click function, it's a trivial matter to get around them - you just turn off your browser's javascript function, or look at the source code and browse directly to the image file. For that matter, you could grab a reasonable facsimile of the image by doing a screen capture.

Watermarking is probably the best, because it delivers an impaired image to the thief. But even that isn't 100 percent reliable - I've seen people with good photoshop skills erase a watermark to the point where the image looks almost as good as the original.

You can also turn your image into a .pdf file, which does effectively disable right-click. However, .pdfs don't display directly on your Web page; visitors have to open them one by one, a process many people find not worth the bother. And a truly persistent thief could print the .pdf and scan the image.

The bottom line is that there is no real technological fix for thievery. If you want to display your work on the Web, you need to be aware of that and not be lulled into a false sense of security by thinking you can make it theft-proof.

-- Pat Kight snipped-for-privacy@peak.org

What you can do is Digimark your images and sue the people who infringe on your copyright if they take the image.

Digimark is invisible. ;)

Sure, but you can "serial number" your property and prosecute the thief. This becomes problematic in countries like Turkey, Russia and China who don't have really good reciprocal intellectual properties laws.

-Tony

*nod* Yes, if you find them, if (as you note) they're in a country with reciprocal copyright laws, and if you can afford the legal costs.

Unfortunately, such measures are beyond the technical and financial resources of many of those who sell their creations on line. I'd imagine the alt.crafts.professional folks, as a group, may be more savvy about what it takes to protect their intellectual property than many of those in the other newsgroups to which this thread is being crossposted. But it's something anyone who sells or displays original work on line should be know about, and be prepared to deal with.

-- Pat Kight snipped-for-privacy@peak.org