They never contacted me about it, and it was only coincidence that I noticed the infringement. When I contacted them to ask about it, they were quite rude, blamed the artist, claimed they were within their rights to use the photo, and stubbornly refused to do anything about it other than give me a credit on the website.

After I persisted they finally agreed to pay me $50; however, I never received the payment.

I ended up dropping it altogether, as the stress it was causing wasn’t worth it. I typically aren’t bothered by a blog using my photo, and have always freely given permission when asked. But I feel much differently when it’s taken by a commercial newspaper with a budget to pay for photography — and the experience to know they should.

I was surprised you didn’t understand this as copyright infringement, but then I’ve been tracking so-called “intellectual property” for some time…

Now, if someone were to crop out the watermark I wouldn’t find that good etiquette and would probably find that offensive.

As for bandwidth, if you are starting to lose that much bandwidth then just disable hotlinking in your control panel.

It’s not the viewers responsibility to know the laws and by some intuitive source know whether the photographer finds it ’stealing’ or exposure.

That’s because the photographer is paying for the bandwidth you are now using.

That’s a double whammy and a very big no-no.

Anyways, I appreciate the writer’s honesty.

so what would you do if they just went straight to your ISP/webhost with a DMCA violation request and had you shut down? They are completely within their rights to do that. Using someone else’s content is using someone else’s content.

One of the reasons that people don’t understand the laws about copyright and copying is that they see people just copy stuff and think it must be OK because everyone else does. But it isn’t OK.

Having said all that, I wouldn’t let the valuable versions of my work out on the web for anyone to copy anyway. The smart move is to make a lower res, less valuable version with a small, subtle notice about author/where to get it – the kind of thing people would just leave in – and then encourage copying.

I’m a photographer, and yes, of course, I’ve had my copyright infringed in all of the above ways, *plus* someone taking a very distinctive and somewhat well-known photo off of my site and using it in a comment on another site of mine, claiming said photo as their own. Yes. Seriously. This has happened.

If someone takes a photo off of my site and uses it with credit but without permission, I may or may not do anything about it, depending upon the larger context. The odds are good that I’ll drop a line just to start a friendly dialogue with someone who appears to like my work. I realize that that might come back to bite me in a legal battle, but there you are.

If someone takes a photo off of my site and uses it without credit or permission, I may ask them to remove it, or give me credit, depending on the context.

If someone HOTLINKS an image off of my site, with or without permission, I will take action. If it’s someone I know or otherwise don’t want to be mean to, I’ll just ask them to stop doing that. Otherwise, public humiliation is the order of the day. I will replace the image in question with something embarrassing for a day or two, then block their IP forever and ever. Die, hotlinking scum!!!

And if someone takes one of my images and claims it for their own and I find out about it, they can put their head between their legs and kiss their ass goodbye.

Obviously, there’s no way I can know for sure how much piracy of my images goes on below the radar — plenty, I’m sure. What’s bizarre is that for the most part, it’s unnecessary. If someone comes to me, says, “Hey, I like your pictures. Is it okay if I…?” and gives me credit, the odds are very high that I’ll say yes and we can be friends. Some people just can’t be bothered, I guess. Oh well.

Long answer (IANAL), in the US, anything written is automatically copyrighted. This includes works of literature, photographs, art work, and even computer source code. The CSS file falls into that last category, as does the HTML file, the images used in the design and any JavaScript, etc.

Design by itself cannot be copyrighted, though it can be patented, but that is a different discussion, and it isn’t granted automatically like copyright is.

That said, if you asked multiple people to write a loop in JavaScript that counted from 1 to 10, they would all look very similar. Likewise, a CSS file that does some basic styling to meet a set of written requirements might end up looking more or less the same to the competition’s response to those same requirements.

When working in a limited language set attempting to accomplish the same goals it is inevitable that many similarities will exist. However, that doesn’t grant you license to take the work done by somebody else without their permission.

Luckily in the web design community, many recognize these facts and only require attribution for you to be granted a license to use their copyrighted work. When taking CSS or JavaScript, etc. from a web source for your own use, make sure to understand the license it is granted under before using yourself.

When you’re an indy worker isolated on your own, you don’t always get that kind of input.