[shuttertalk]

One advantage of digital media is that it is easily transmissible, meaning you can post it all around the internet, distribute it for others to see without much effort at all. That same advantage is also a huge disadvantage in that others can easily use those said images without your knowledge and/or permission.

For me, I've had entire articles on this site ripped off and published elsewhere (all the while linking back images hosted on my servers, oh the irony!). I'm sure many of you would have faced situations where your images have been stolen without attribution, let alone any recompense.

Anyway I thought this article by Alain Briot was both informative and helpful for preventing people from stealing your work, and also what to do if you have discovered your work being stolen.

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/column...work.shtml

A couple of points I found interesting were:
- Publicise the infringement through your social networks (e.g. Facebook or twitter) and hopefully the internet army will help you generate some awareness or negative publicity towards them

- Some tools such as tineye and that cool Firefox extension will help search the internet for any copies of an image that you specify - to help you check if your work has been stolen.


Anyway, chime in if you've had any experiences where your photos have been used without permission, or whether you think the suggestions in the article are helpful or not.

[Xception]

I have had this happen to me as well, with photographs and other images created or hosted legally on my websites. Never from a University or anything like that though, WOW... That's a little bit insane, aren't those students paying tens of thousands of dollars to learn about how to succeed in various art and other industries? C'mon!
I make most of my websites using WordPress. There is a great free plugin to disable right click on your websites here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/no-r...es-plugin/

That makes it hard for anyone to steal your images since they can't right click to either save the file or copy the image URL. You have to be an advanced tech person to get past that. Another thing I do is I watch my server stats, you can just check whichever stats tracking programs are included in your hosting. Look for any image files that are getting more hits than the pages they are hosted on, then check the referrers. There are also many settings on your hosting account that can be tweaked to make it harder to steal images, like blocking hot-linking. If you don't know a lot about website hosting and server administration, cpanel or your host's control panel, try asking them. A ticket to the support department could get some added security and helpful tips from them.

[EnglishBob]

Missed this thread first time around, really like the TinEye addon for firefox!