Image Copyrights

My boss steals images constantly

[cuce]

Hello, I am leaving my current place of employment soon, and I now that I would not so much be risking my job, I'd like to know where the blame goes and what happens to people who steal images from stock photography sites.

Does any of the blame go on the designers?

[Leosghost]

Only usually on the guy who owns the company ( legal responsibility etc goes with the deciding the split on the profits )..

IANAL..nor probably posting from your juristiction ..but most times you as a designer working for another as an employee are not responsible for your bosses deeds ..

To answer the second part of your question ..if the owners of the copyright get to know who is ripping them off ..most times their lawyers make the culprit the present of a new ***hole and remove his assets ..they may even be interested to hear from you privately ..with evidence .

[cuce]

Thanks LeosGhost

I appreciate that. I'm not completely sure I want to go out of my way to get them in trouble. I've been waiting for them to get caught for over 2 years and still nothing. I think karma will get them in the end.

Does anyone think its my duty to report this kind of thing?

or maybe I should wait for the universe to do its work...?

[Essex_boy]

Its his problem and not yours, you may not like the guy but you never know when youll need him again.

Keep quiet and leave

[Syzygy]

Photo libraries invariably provide searchers with thumbnail sized images and then larger comping images - for use in mocking up artwork, layouts, etc. In some cases libraries will send you full size images, to experiment with, at no cost at all.

Photo libraries track image searches very closely but are pretty powerless to do much to stop anyone downloading a thumbnail at say, 120px, or a comping image at 400px, and then incorporating it into a web page.

Some libraries have all thumbnails and comps watermarked; some do not. You could always discreetly email the url's of pages with offending images to said libraries...

Syzygy

[kiwibrit]

Talking of thumbnails, how does Google get round copyright when it produces them? Whilst the image is considerably reduced, it is still a copy. And though some may welcome the publicity given to a site by a Google thumbnail - I'm not clear that gives Google the right to do it.

I appreciate most of us don't have the pockets to take Google to court. But I wonder how legal the action of them producing thumbnails is.

[lcampers]

That's an interesting point.

Some of my traffic comes from only image search via Google and Yahoo.

That means only my pictures showed on their image search page and I didn't receive any visitors to my text site or anywhere other than the image search page.

I would think this could be a good legal argument for copyright.

Maybe a lawyer would be interested in doing a class-action, just to stop the practice.

[easygoin]

You can currently "instruct" Gooleys bots to not cache your images, and also make gooleys remove your existing cached images. I believe this is also true of other SE's - if you use a simple text file in the root of the website called (robots.txt) with some basic info in there, it should preevent the bots from trauling through the directories and files you specify are "denied". Only the "bad" bots then ignore this and try to trawl through everything, but they aren't worth worrying about in terms of what you are talking about.

I am afraid what you suggest with regards to court and legal action is pretty mute as a result.

[willjan]

In 1999 US Federal Courts ruled in Kelly vs. Arriba that thumbnails were not a copyright violation. There have been a lot of issues raised since then, but this remains the standard for now.

The idea that a copyright holder must on his own place blocks for web crawlers isn't my idea of the right way to go, the law doesn't regard requiring you to put your money in a safe or else it is "ok" to steal.

As to the ethical question orginally raised, the moral dilemma is you know that your boss steals costantly. Do you tip off the agencies?

If you saw another sort of theft, would you be feeling responsible to report it?

In the age where copyright theft is undermining many small businesses, not just large agencies, I'd lean towards making the decision to let the victims know about it. And, even with large agencies, their content is often provided by small independent photographers supplying work. They loose their royalties.

Willjan