Stealing Photos

Somebody stole your image, and is using it on their website! You are pissed off! They stole your photo! Slow down.

1. Send a cease and desist letter. A cease-and-desist letter is a letter demanding that the recipient of the letter stops ... or face legal action.
2. Breath-in
3. Breath-out
4. Think
5. Instead of the cease and desist letter: what about asking for money?
6. Instead of the cease and desist letter: be happy that they are "promoting" your work.

There are millions of photos pirated each day, mostly from Flickr. It could be worth, they could have ignored your photos and pirated someone else.

What is worst?

• Having your photos ignored and not pirated?
• Having your photos pirated?

If your photos are on the web:

1. Assume that they will be pirated.
2. Make them low resolution.
3. Have a medium size copyright notice, that does not intrude too much on the photo.
4. Have a medium website address on the photo, that does not intrude too much on the photo.
5. Hope for many other websites pirated your photos so they can give you exposure to many more people and markets that you did not know.
6. Still send a letter asking for money attaching a PDF file with the webpage having your photo.
7. Sleep well at night.

In other words, your pirated photos become your advertising/marketing.

I'd rather people pirate WordPerfect than Microsoft's Word.

— Michael Cowpland — Ex-owner and ex-CEO of Corel/WordPerfect