Preventing Image Theft
Filed Under How-To's
If you’re like me, auction pictures are the most time consuming part of the eBay selling process. The investment in time and effort required to produce a photo for an effective auction listing is significant. After meticulously adjusting the lighting, experimenting with various angles, editing, cropping, and finally, uploading the picture to your image host, it’s extremely infuriating to find your picture on a competitor’s listing. Frustrating as it is, there are several courses of action available to deter and deal with image fraud.
The first step you should take when confronted with image theft is to contact the offending seller and ask them to remove your picture. As incredible as it may seem, many people who use the internet, even some seasoned eBay sellers, assume that everything on the web is free for the taking, including your copyrighted auction images. A simple email explaining that the pictures in question are copyrighted and politely requesting that they remove them from their auction listings should do the trick. If they refuse or ignore your request, your next recourse is to contact eBay. If you can prove that you own the copyright, eBay will remove and delete the offending listings.
An Ounce of Prevention
I choose to be proactive rather than reactive when dealing with image theft. Although there are several technical measures you can take to deter your competition from “borrowing” your pictures (such as java scripts and modifying your .htaccess files), I find the simplest precautions often work the best.
Simply superimposing your eBay user ID or website URL on the picture will make the photo unusable to the competition. Image editing software such as Adobe Photoshop Elements, Irfanview (freeware), or the free website MyImager.com all offer effective methods of adding text to your auction photos. The example below was edited online at MyImager.com.
Text should be carefully placed as to not obscure the product you’re selling while making it impossible for your competition to crop or edit it out of the picture. A translucent font is the best option for those with access to more capable image editing utilities.
Unfortunately your best efforts to prevent and/or resolve image theft are sometimes in vain. On one occasion, an eBay powerseller included my web site’s home page auctioneer cartoon on each of his hundreds of listings. While this particular clipart image is in the public domain and I don’t own the copyright, the offending seller was linking directly to the image file hosted on my server. This resulted in a noticeable load on my site’s bandwidth usage – bandwith that I’m obligated to pay for. After my numerous requests to quit stealing my bandwidth went unanswered and unheeded for several weeks, I decided to take a more aggressive stance.
After renaming the clipart’s image file, I uploaded a different picture (left) to my server and gave it the original name of the hijacked clip art. The result was that this picture, with its incriminating message, suddenly appeared on each active listing of this powerseller. Now, would you bid on an auction that sported this image? Not surprisingly, it wasn’t long until the seller stopped stealing my bandwith.
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5 Responses to “Preventing Image Theft”
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Sir,
Great “insight”…. I am on here to go to the link to do some sniping…
My brother in law used your sight to “win” an elusive railroad watch he had been trying to get for some time.
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Personally I dont think that stealing and image is a big deal especially if the image is a common one… Like a picture of an IPOD they are all over sorry have to disagree I give you other the permission to steal my photos as I will probably do the same thanks!!
I Disagree with SB’s comment. Bandwidth theft is a big deal. If you host your own website you are allotted a certain amount of bandwidth a month and if you go over that amount you WILL be charged on a per megabyte basis. Whilst this is accepted for legitimate users of website why should the website owner pay for your use of the image. By all means copy the image (obtain permission first) and upload it to an image hosting service that allows hot linking. Most are free so there is no excuse for bandwidth theft. A quick search on google will yield loads of results for free photo hosting.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=photo+host+hotlinking&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
Another suggestion–put an advertisement for your own site into the photo–if they’re going to “steal” your bandwidth, they might as well give you some free advertising!
Yet another suggestion – use some on-line service like http://www.jpegbay.com which provides both a free hosting, and lets you label/sign all the uploaded images.