Adsense site stole my images

Reporting to Google?

[silverbytes]

I big website about photos and picutres stolen most of my images from one website of mine. They have in fact almost all photos stolen from other sites and not hotlinking; they mass downloaded photos and added their own brandname on.

Site has no contact information at all and it's purpose is to show adsense ads only. (of course they don't want to be contacted).

Is there anything you can do about it to report the robbery?

[wyweb]

DMCA

[jomaxx]

Note that you have own the copyright on the images in order to file a DMCA complaint. Google requires you to swear to this, "under penalty of perjury". If the images originally came from elsewhere, you may be out of luck.

[koan]

Send a DMCA to Google Adsense, they should remove those images pretty quick (from my experiences). If it's not their first time offense, they can get banned too, which is very desirable. Serial plagiarists should be shown no mercy.

Site has no contact information at all

They usually don't. I hope for you they don't have a blog with Google (blogger, blogspot) either because then you'll have to send signed faxes or snail mails instead of a regular email like the other more respectable blog hosting web sites.

[martinibuster]

>>>Site has no contact information at all

Report false whois info to their registrar.

If they have invalid contact info, you can't give them a warning to take down your content prior to filing a DMCA. That's their screw up. They forced your hand so if you're going to file a DMCA, you may want to consider filing it with their web host, domain name registrar, AND Google. I have recieved good responses by faxing the DMCA to Google and mailing the hard copy.

Good luck.

[potentialgeek]

I don't like the way Google handles stolen content. DCMA is fine, but first it should notify the site and ask for a response. A non-response is a default and saves the copyright holder from wasting time (and possibly expense) filing an official DCMA complaint.

There aren't so many folks who'll put in writing they own content when it can be easily proven they don't. Especially when not removing the content immediately puts at risk the permanent loss of their Adsense account. Most internet thieves know this.

p/g

[silverbytes]

I think Adsense TOS will not like their position. They also have at least 2 blogger sites to promote the stealing site. Is there anything to do in Blogger (I marked sites)?

Anybody may sticky for details (Adsense has a section to report and I know publisher id).

They took also many merchandising photos.

[swa66]

I think you should contact the ISP(s) providing connectivity to the website hosting the content. If they are US based, a DMCA compliant take down request is what should do the trick.

Sending a DMCA notification to Google should help to remove them from the search engine results as well (as they can always get a new ISP a few times).

Reporting them for possible adsense violation is also an option to turn off their revenue source. But this is actually getting slowly into the revenge realm.

I'm not sure about the blogger.com terms, but check them if promoting copyright violations is banned (likely as the movie and music industry is going to try to toast them is they don't ban it)

Copyright gives you the right to forbid them to make copies and publish them. Try to aim there as it's the easiest place to get them down.

[farmboy]

AdSense DMCA instructions and information - [google.com...]

FarmBoy

[ja222666]

[lcweb.loc.gov...]

[silverbytes]

I think you should contact the ISP(s) providing connectivity to the website hosting the content

Whois information mention Godaddy as regsitrar, but how do I know where is it hosted exactly?

[f1r3b4ll]

If you took the pictures yourself and can verify that you are the legal owner, then you can definitely file a DMCA. If you didn't take the pictures yourself or you are not the legal owner you can still file a DMCA, but it might fall on deaf ears. Also, you should make sure that the site with the images you claim are yours does not have a disclaimer stating that all images come from the public domain.

If you listed your website and published images on the net, your website is in the public domain.

Also, please indicate in a disclaimer that you don't grant permission to borrow content unless explicitly stated.

Make sure you have good contact info and make sure that you tried to contact them.

Aside from that, if they are borrowing your images for a different purpose, don't get mad if someone found more utility out of images you have but are not the legal owner of.

Please go here for more information

[chillingeffects.org...]

Good luck and work on SEO.

I think this section might interest you:

[chillingeffects.org...]

Read this as well:
[chillingeffects.org...]

[brianng]

What kind of images? Is it something that you've created completely by yourself or something that you've created using other graphics on the Internet?

[silverbytes]

Both. Does it means I must do something before publishing every photo in my sites in order to demonstrate it's mine later?

[f1r3b4ll]

Yes you can do something about it.

You can put a watermark on your images. By your images, I mean images that you legally own.

If you take a picture from a magazine (or other source), scan it and put it online, you are not the legal owner. You are simply deriving a different use for the image and you should not put a watermark on it.

[f1r3b4ll]

Another note here, images cannot be indexed by search engines unless they have proper tags.

So if the website that borrowed images that you have is using them for a different purpose, then your website should not be affected.

If it is affected, find out why it is affected.
Chances are, SEO has something to do with it.

[varya]

If you listed your website and published images on the net, your website is in the public domain.

This is incorrect. Copyrighted material is *not* in the public domain unless the copyright term has expired or the copyright holder has specifically released it.

Placing content on the web does not release it to public domain. It is definitely still protected by copyright.

[martinibuster]

Another note here, images cannot be indexed by search engines unless they have proper tags.

Search engines use surrounding text, among other things, to guess at what an image is.

;)
Cheers.

Let's keep this thread on topic. The issue of copyright has been settled by varya, let's move on.

:)
Thanks.

[edited by: martinibuster at 10:15 pm (utc) on Feb. 4, 2008]

[jomaxx]

Farmboy, the first statement you quoted is simply incorrect.

The second statement was specifically referring to "images you have but are not the legal owner of". I see so many image gallery type sites where the pictures are either (a) scanned in, or (b) collected from other web sites, that IMO this is a reasonable comment.

[Hmm, the messages I was replying to are now all gone. Oh well.]

[swa66]

I think you should contact the ISP(s) providing connectivity to the website hosting the content

Whois information mention Godaddy as regsitrar, but how do I know where is it hosted exactly?

whois also has information on IP addresses.

I'll assume for simplicity sake that you use a unix command line (if you don't there are dozens of websites that provide a web front end but since I can't link to them anyway ...)

First find the IP address of the webserver(s):

$ dig www.webmasterworld.com a

It'll yield a.o.

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.webmasterworld.com. 86400 IN CNAME webmasterworld.com.
webmasterworld.com. 86399 IN A 72.3.232.139

Alternatively you could just "ping" the server, it should echo (one of) the IP address(es) too.

$ whois -h whois.arin.net 72.3.232.139 

Will point out where it is hosted (I'll not mention the results to avoid moderator intervention needs.)

If the server's IP range is outside of north america, you need to know the whois servers for the other continents:

whois.ripe.net

whois.apnic.net

whois.lacnic.net

whois.afrinic.net

If you forget them, don't worry, arin will point you to these organizations if you read the output in detail.

Some countries run their own service. e.g. like korea on

whois.nic.or.kr