Ever watch those ‘stupid criminal’ shows where they tell stories of bank robbers writing their demands on the back of their utility bill? Or how about the real life scenario of a friend spilling the beans that the client they sent your way has the photos framed allover her house? But you don’t remember getting an order from them? Yeah.
I don’t believe the clients who have stolen from me have done so maliciously. I don’t think they’re thinking of the hard work and thousands of pounds worth of equipment I’m still paying for which I used to produce their images. But that doesn’t mean they don’t need to be educated.
I’m going to write a more exhaustive post about protecting your intellectual property legally and how to deal with cases of copyright infringement. So this post is mainly about the things I’ve done in the past to educate others about their theft of my blood, sweat and tears.
- I received an invite to a baby shower which had images of the friends’ maternity session which hadn’t been requested from me. I think they’d been swiped off Facebook. I kindly emailed them and asked that the next time they would like to use my images, they ask first so I can send them better quality versions which have my logo on them. Easy peasy.
Facebook – this one is a killer. Although I do sometimes provide web-ready images for clients to share (it’s great publicity) I’m NOT ok when they swipe the photos from their preview gallery, crop out the “do not copy” watermark and post them on FB and then never ever buy a single photo from their session. It’s so easy to catch them, too. These clients are easily traceable because most of my business comes by word of mouth. Just take a morning to troll through the friends lists of your friends who send you clients and the photos are often their profile pics. Or simply search for your most recent clients via their email address. Send them a message to let them know that they’re stealing and you would like them to (please) remove the photos and buy the web-ready disk from their order form. If they don’t remove them in a reasonable amount of time (and let’s face it, most of us check our FB multiple times a day so it’s not like they’ll need a week) then you can report them to FB for copyright infringement. I’ve done this before and the photos are removed and the person is notified of the issue. And then when you see them every day dropping the kids off at school, they can’t make eye contact with you. LOL- I’ve actually been emailed by clients who (somehow) downloaded or copied one of their images and they need help because the canvas they tried to print at the local grocery store came out all ‘fuzzy’. Um…no thank you! I’ve got no problem telling friends and clients now in no uncertain terms (although nicely) that this is piracy and no different than burning a CD of my music if I were a musician. It’s not any different just because they’re photos.
Those are the only scenarios I can think of at the moment. Please leave your stories of piracy in the comments below!
