Sunday, 3 June 2012

Oh deary me...

As you may recall, I've had a small problem with plagiarism and people using my articles and associated photos without my permission. Mostly it's been the same person, who has plagiarised a whole slew of my articles not just once, not just twice, but three times (I had to issue another DMCA takedown against the "Lady" Cattra earlier this year after I discovered her blogs were public again, and there were even more of them, with most of the articles I'd had removed via DMCA re-added).

It's been a hassle and extremely frustrating trying to deal with it, but I'm hoping that it's all done and dusted with that particular blogger. But while the sheer level of plagiarism beggared belief there, I'm now dealing with a whole new level of unbelievable: I am dealing with a serious case of "hapless." If I'm being charitable.

A recipe website has been using my pictures without my permission. No biggie, really. It's a bit cheeky, I think, but at least the images haven't had fairy sparkles shat all over them, and nor are they claiming copyright or threatening to sue me for publicly pointing out the fact that they're the ones who've done wrong. Whatever.

But I feel I should point out that the recipe for Fife bannock at:

"Perfect Diet Recipes.com"

Was originally accompanied by a photo of mine for the Selkirk bannock. (To add insult to injury, the image was credited to "Bing Images." Oh dear, Microsoft. They're not really helping your image, are they?). The recipe isn't mine, just the image. Seeing as I thought it was a bit cheeky, and the wrong image, I left a comment to point this out. I mean, the bannock in the picture clearly had dried fruit in it, which Fife bannocks do not. You'd think someone running the website would notice, no?

My comment was left in the moderation queue for a while and after checking back occasionally to see if it had been published or dealt with, I eventually found it had been deleted and the picture was still there. I don't have a paid account on flickr right now so I can't just go back through my photos to find it, but I finally realised at this point that I could probably search for it, just like they did. Problem solved (even if I did feel a bit slow for not realising I could do that sooner...). So that's what I did, and that, I thought, was that.

I happened to click on the page in my bookmarks list just now, only to discover that they're using another of my bannock pictures to illustrate their page. This time, a picture of a Brodick bannock...

I mean really. They can't even thieve the right image.

Check out their 'disclaimer' page, though:
All of the pictures that we display on this web are not belong to us, all copyrights belong to the image creators / manufacturers. We have great respect for the pictures owner, we are sorry if we can not display the credit to all the pictures. We just collect automatically from Google Image Search with Google Search Image API. 
Video Content :
We use Youtube APi to give automatically related video content on this web.
If our content in this web have ilegal issue, copy right protected, DMCA Policy or other reason please contact us . We will read your message early and make evaluation to make this web be better for our and visitor in this web.
So yeah...Perhaps not surprising. 

I've removed the image again, but I suppose I'm finally going to have to bite the bullet and start watermarking the images I use on the website or keep on with the occasional moaning and/or bemused head shaking.