Ebay Seller Lifting my picture

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ocimum_nate
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Ebay Seller Lifting my picture

Post by ocimum_nate »

I found a seller that is using my picture to sell their plants on ebay and amazon.com. Without my permission. It really ticks me off. I filed notice with amazon.com that they were using my picture without permission though I have yet to hear back from them yet. Anyone else experience this ? What would you do?
Here is a link to my picture
http://www.flickr.com/photos/natesplant ... 09273@N01/

And here are links to their items
http://cgi.ebay.com/Green-Panda-Bamboo- ... 56420fcae9
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003YM ... d_i=507846
Alan_L
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Re: Ebay Seller Lifting my picture

Post by Alan_L »

How the heck did you find out?

I would contact the seller -- it seems like they're an established "real" business. I'd ask for them to add your copyright to the image, and show them the original image on your Flickr page.

The problem in today's digital world is that they may have found the photo somewhere else after somebody else got it from your Flickr page. It has been modified a bit (besides having your watermark removed). They may have gotten it from a site that says it's ok to reuse the image.

Maybe you should change your watermark, adding "copyright" to it, making it larger, and more transparent. I see this on a lot of professional photos that get posted, something like this:

Image

There's probably nothing you can do about it though -- there are most likely others using your photos and you just don't know about it. When I upload a photo I think of it as making a contribution to the global information "library".
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