Blatant Theft.

For some years now I have been a contributor to a website called morguefile.com . It was started by two brothers in America as a memorial to their parents who were ‘special needs’ teachers. Pictures on the site can be used royalty free for almost any purpose except as stand alone images for sale.

I liked the idea and have put JPGs over when I can, my thought being that when I am gone, there will still be little bits of me floating around all over the world. I am now getting closer to half a million downloads of my work, and hope that by the end of the year I might reach that figure.

Now let me tell you a little tip. If you contribute pictures to a website and wish to know about their use, right click on a picture and then select “Search Google for this image”

Within moments Google will return to you with a reply. Such is the wonder of the ‘net’. It won’t tell you every use but only the ones that are on the internet itself.

I often look like that to see what is going on. Agents on other sites that sell pictures frequently copy over free work from Morguefile as tempters to get folk to dig into the site for work they must pay for. This is fair enough they are nor charging for the free ones. I was amazed though to find on a website called Mineshots.com  that one of their contributors had stolen many of my JPGs and loaded them there as his own work. As far as I am concerned this is downright theft and that contributor is a liar.

I have made comments on his page but can find no way to contact the site owners, there is no Email address link. All I can do is to put comments on any of my pictures that the thief has posted as his own. Like the following one that alerted me in the first place. I have now by looking through his pages found almost 20 stolen pictures and I am less than a quarter way through. The picture used as the header on this blog, was one of them.

http://mineshots.com/Users-galleries/Marcco-Tomosius/Other-nice-photos/DSC09087.JPG-23160p.html

To other contributors to any photo site I would say – examine this man's work pages and see if he has stolen from you as well..

This has now been settled by the owner of the website. The offender has been kicked off of the site and all his - and other folks - pictures removed.