Stolen picture

I was looking at the cornsnake forum at Kingsnake.com and came across a picture that looked strangely familiar. A person named Shawn posted a test picture of a amel. corn that just happened to come from my website. Shawn didn't post a email addy so I couldn't contact him/her to find out what's up with this. I'm not up on copyright laws but I would think my website pitures are protected. If the person had contacted me I would of gladely given permission to use the picture as I have numerous times before. My question is what if anything do you think I should do about this? Although there was no email addy I was able to find out that the pilfered picture is being stored at gdscentral.com. Let me know what you think.

You can contact gdscentral.com and explain that is your image that is hosted on their machine. They may remove it or may contact the renter of the space and let him know. If he wasn't trying to sell the snake protrayed in the image or using it to gain anything (prestige or anything) then it may be more work than it's worth to get it removed. Why not just post underneath it &quot;Great job posting pics [since you said it was a pic posting test]. We have many more snakes just like the image you got at www.http://www.geocities.com/southamptonherps/Southampton_He/Page_1x.html ... &quot; you get the jist. Turn it into a positive viral marketing tool instead of email someone (probably a ten year old kid <img src="http://www.faunaclassifieds.com/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=''> ) and taking the chance of coming out looking like a sourpuss.

Another thing you may want to do is throw on your URL (find a shorter one &nbsp;<img src="http://www.faunaclassifieds.com/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=''> &nbsp as a unobtrusive watermark in your images. This will get the same viral marketing without all the work (even on the ones you don't find).

It also helps to add something like:
&quot;All Photography ©2001 - Cockroaches' Realm&quot;
to the bottom of your pages or under you pictures to
make it official. It helps if you're trying to prove a point.
Good Luck.

i liked dan's suggestion. &nbsp;i'd definately post underneath this guy's post.
as far as laws go, for all art the laws changed several years ago. &nbsp;as i understand it, all art is copyrighted whether there is a signature or not--many artists had considered signatures obstructive to the viewing of the image, and this was part of the reason for this change. &nbsp;i suppose it is a lot easier to put a sig on the image for proof, but i would suspect your website is proof enough.
dana

I did post under the persons post. the person posted an apology and said they where using the pic. to show friends what there snake looked like (they didn't have a picture of their snake). the person said that they where not familiar with the program they where using and linked to my picture by mistake. I accepted the apology and suggested they use the preview function in the future. Actually the picture got more comments this time than when I posted it six months ago. This was very funny peculiar and in the end a little funny ha ha. I never dreamed someone would want my lousy pictures.

IF it is on the net, and you haven't copyrighted it, it's free game!

I myself use my photo prgram to add text to my pics. I have my name on every pic. THis way if someone wants to use it they have to edit the entire pic inside another program. Most people want a quick fix and won't do this.

There is a script you can ad to your website pages that doesn't allow right clicking on your pages. Email me for the script.
I woudl post it here but, you couldn't copy it cuase it will not allow you to right click, OOPPS :-)

Jim