The Rough Guide to Photo Theft

O
ne day, about 15 years ago, I was perusing the local real estate listings on a popular national real estate website and I saw one of my photos being used to advertise a house. The only problem was that I had never licensed this photo privately and never uploaded it to a stock library. The real estate agent had just decided that my photo was fair game and figured they were unlikely to ever get found out. So they downloaded it, cropped it so as to remove my watermark and then added it to their client’s house listing.

Over the years this has happened to me on more occasions than I care to mention.In fact if I fire up my Pixsy copyright tracking account I can see that my photos are currently being used on upwards of 3500 different websites without my permission.

And we’re not just talking a few unknown bloggers hijacking from my Instagram feed – I can see the Marriot hotel chain in there, along with Expedia, Nordstroms, Agoda and hundreds of other travel websites.

And of course I am not some unique case. I’m pretty sure that this is something that every moderately successful photographer on the planet experiences on a daily basis. But what can be done about it? Is it possible to protect your photographs such that they don’t get continually ripped off? Are there ways around those protections? What can you do if a photograph is stolen? Is it possible to get financially reimbursed for the use of your photography or are you on a hiding to nothing? Is it worth doing anything at all?