Eric Schreiber wrote:
Tony Cooper wrote:

The really neat situation is where someone links to your image.
You can change the source of the link to an image that
they...ummm....wouldn't want to put up.

Yeah, I'm thinking about doing something like that right now. One of my
images (a Puerto Rican flag sculpture in Chicago) is hot-linked a LOT
by various people, usually just kids using it as a backdrop to their
own personal (non-commercial) web sites.

This used to annoy me, but I've pretty much gotten over it.

However, a commercial outfit is hot-linking another image from my site,
and using it as a product photo for something they sell (a particular
species of fish). That one irritates me. A lot.

This is what lawyers are for. If you really want to have any chance of
collecting, have a consultation and run the plan past them first to see
if it has any flaws.

For example, here's one approach:

First, make sure that your website has a notice regarding unauthorized
copyright use.

Similarly, make sure that your hotlinked photo does clearly have your
(C) displayed on it (in addition to a hidden watermark). Make sure
that this version of the image is in place long enough to get into
Google, and the old version has been purged out of their archives.

Grabbing a copy of their source code is a good idea too.

This is all prep work before you give them any notification of the
unauthorized use.


I'm considering sending them a bill for unauthorized use of copyrighted
image, as well as for the bandwidth.

IMO, I suspect that its probably more successful to send them a very
bland invoice, with the terms of use specified, dates, etc. The
general approach is to let them assume that someone within their
organization had initiated this (which they did, by creating the hot
link) and you're just following-up (which you are).


Alternately, I could just change the source image to
something less, um, saleable.

After they ignore your invoice for, say, 30 days, replace your original
with a "ghosted out" copy of it with text over it, such as this:

http://www.huntzinger.com/photo/2002/germany/euros.jpg

In your case, the message should be something along the lines of:

"Image removed because account is more than 30 days overdue"

Make sure to include your email address in this text-over for them to
contact you at. Be polite and offer to fax them a new invoice...with
an overdue acount fee, of course.


-hh