www.istockphoto.com could be slling your photos

http://www.istockphoto.com/index.php

on another fourm, some of they guys found someone posting pics from another breeders sit...only to find out that they person payed www.istockphoto.com and was sold to the person as a royalty free photo, which it isnt....everyone should look and see if any of your photos are on their being sold without you knowing.....

yeah guys u might want to check it out some of the photos look really familair.

Completely not the same thing, but about Istockphoto, for some reason when my ATM card number got stolen in February, somebody bought a 1 month subscription to Istockphoto with it.
I have no idea what kind of person would steal an ATM card and buy stock photos with it, but probably the same kind that would steal other people's photos and sell it as their own.

It's a stock photo site. I ain't about to sift through all the legal mumbo jumbo, but I bet if you agree, sign on, and upload images to the site, you just gave all member a right to use those pictures.

iStock does nothing but sell stock imagery submitted by photographers (the photographers of course get a commission for each image sold). Are you sure the breeder your speaking about didn't use iStock photography for their website?

How about showing the photos in question compared to the breeder's site they were supposedly stolen from instead of such a generic post that really doesn't provide any information. iStock only accepts very high quality, very high resolution photos...You can't just pull low resolution web images offline and submit them. So if the photos were stolen and then uploaded to iStock, I'd like to know why someone would be dumb enough to upload a large, high resolution photo onto their website in the first place.

I was the person who found it. The photos in question were stolen from Mike Wilbanks of Constrictors unlimited. He had no idea they were stolen, and is in the process of handling them right now.. Some of his photos in use are on www.topballpythons.com.

The kid claimed he purchased them from iStock, so I scoped it out and they're selling quite a few of his.

http://www.constrictors.com/Collecti...allPython.html

http://www.constrictors.com/Collecti...allPython.html

http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-pho...ree-snakes.php

As for why Wilbanks would be "dumb" enough. Why don't you ask him personally?...

Well, they don't make it easy to file a claim with them:

http://www.istockphoto.com/terms_of_use.php

Notice and Procedure for Making Claims of Infringement


iStockphoto LP respects the copyright of others, and we ask our users to do the same. If you believe that your work has been copied in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, or your intellectual property rights have been otherwise violated, please provide iStockphoto with a written communication addressed to our President including substantially the following information:

1. an electronic or physical signature of the person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright or other intellectual property interest;
2. description of the copyrighted work or other intellectual property that you claim has been infringed;
3. a description of where the material that you claim is infringing is located on the Web site;
4. your address, telephone number, and email address;
5. a statement by you that you have a good faith belief that the disputed use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law;
6. a statement by you, made under penalty of perjury, that the above information in your notice is accurate and that you are the copyright or intellectual property owner or authorized to act on the copyright or intellectual property owner's behalf.

Please address your letter to our CEO, as follows:
iStockphoto LP
Suite 200, 1240 - 20th Avenue S.E.
Calgary, Alberta
Canada T2G 1M8

Attention: CEO

Related article from 2008:

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/...es-under-fire/

I've contacted the Photographer through iStock and pointed him here.

It should be noted that the largest size of the trio of Ball Pythons that can be downloaded from iStock is 3872x2892 while the photo on Constrictors.com is only 750x379. The Photographer that posted them on iStock evidently had access to the original files and did not acquire them off of the breeders website.

Kind of funny... Wilbanks is the photographer, produced that morph first, and owns quite a bit of gear.

It's fairly easy to increase an images size and run some filters on the image to clean it up.

Originally Posted by Kaa22

It's fairly easy to increase an images size and run some filters on the image to clean it up.

No it's not, especially at the size that we're talking about. That is more then three times larger. The quality would be completely unusable and would never be accepted by iStock.

I hope the photographer comes here and posts. These are pretty serious accusations and he is profiting from the photos, so if he's in the US it's grounds for a lawsuit. I'd like to know too how he was able to acquire the high resolution images in the first place.