Fiona Robertson

Most creative people at some point will have their work stolen; it’s the risk we take in displaying it, especially online where a simple right click of the mouse can make a copy of something you created. We’ve all read stories about it or heard of it happening to someone else. But what do you do when it happens to you?

Yesterday it happened to me.

A quick search on Google Images showed a logo I created being shown on someone else’s website, someone who had not asked permission to use my image, who had not credited me as it’s owner, and, as it turned out, had hotlinked the image. Imagine the outrage!

The website appeared to be a photo blog for a singer, made up almost entirely of hotlinked images!

I emailed the site owner, who responded almost immediately. He had no idea that this part of his site even existed as it had been hacked and promptly arranged for the photoblog to be removed (about 12 hours later, there’s no sign of it or the images – I am very impressed!). He was very apologetic, even though this was not his fault.

Thankfully on this occasion, the situation was resolved, but what about next time? How do we protect ourselves from this kind of behaviour?

I’d love to hear about your experiences with this; have you had work stolen? How did you resolve the situation?

Other articles you might like:

What is hotlinking and bandwidth theft?
Design Theft – The Webmaster’s Recourse
The benefits of being unique
Copyright Explained: I May Copy It, Right?

Tags: copyright, hotlinking, web security

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 28th, 2009 at 11:09 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.