Indian sites stealing my images

ask nicely, threaten, take legal action or shame them?

[lbobke]

After I came across a forum where some of my Australia photos had been nicked by a user, I browsed both Google and Yahoo image search looking for some of my better known pictures.
I sure found quite a few sites copying them most of which were Indian travel sites stealing pictures I took in India.
One of the sites even printed their web address as a "watermark" across the picture!

Those pictures have been on my websites for many years, they have been indexed by the Internet archive and, of course, I have the original slides.
So, it should be no problem to demonstrate authorship.
The only question is: will this work with Indian websites? Does anyone here have any experiences with Indian websites?

Actually, in most cases, I would have no problems with their using my photos provided they were properly accredited.
I already had one user write into my guestbook that she had seen some of my pictures elsewhere and asking whether I had stolen them!

Laurenz

PS: if everything else fails, would it be a good idea to put up a page with the names of companies infringing my copyright? (Of course not granting them the benfit of a direct link)
My site has PR 6 and such a page would have a good chance of outranking most of the culprits for their own name...

[james_allot]

I think you should try to contact the webmaster of the site and address your concern. Try to explain him the seriousness of the matter. I think that will work. It works lot of time.

[anallawalla]

You'll get fairly quick gratification via the DMCA complaint route at Google, Yahoo etc. Without the visibility there, the Indian site would be SOL.

It is very painless - I have done it at Google. They need a signed fax (or paper sent by mail) and the offending site will be out of the SERPs - which you need to identify.

If the Indian site has AdSense on it, read the AdSense TOS to see if visual content falls within their definition of a copyright violation.

Don't bother to contact the site until you have the above well in train. Google DMCA will contact the site to get their version and your complaint will be visible at the Chillingeffects site (minus identifying details).