In the cases cited here, we sent this post to any professional organizations listed on the offending sites. I’ve gotten letters back from those groups that they were doing everything from stripping the person of accreditation to taking legal action. Taking information getting email addresses and physical addresses are key in this. You, your lawyer and these organizations need information or these site just go dark and you can’t find them. Noble photography tried this but we had the details on them first with the proof to send to CAPA who is now taking legal action. Don’t just write an email to have the work removed. Get the details and screen shots first, send this to your lawyer if you want to or send a DCMA notice to the web host. Google also has tools for this as well.

We not only need have these thieves off the internet, we need to make examples of them and the photographers need compensation for the work that has been stolen. It’s most important for the couples and families that would otherwise hire these people. If they think the person has the experience and skill to capture their special (and expensive) wedding day or other event, they will be very disappointed and they will be out the memories and money they thought they invested.

Clearly it helps our site when you all come to visit us but that’s not my motivation. Every time you loose a client and the thieves gain one, we all loose, including the client. Banding together we can have some effect and discourage this from happening. So I’d like anyone who wants to share this post on Facebook, their blog or whatever way they like, to do so. Get the word out we’re watching and your name will be recorded for the future.

I spent a lot of time when I first built my site learning how to optimize it for the search engines, so the fact that I show up high on the search results in many markets has undoubtedly been a factor in being targeted by lazy thieves who think that by stealing my text and code that they will get similar search results. I also spend a lot of time trying to write interesting text that is relevant to my target audience, so they will want to spend time on and return to my site. I have very little tolerance for this theft of my work, and will now usually just go straight to the webhost of the offending site, file a formal notice of DMCA violation, and have the offending site taken down.

The amusing thing is how often these thieves leave links on place that link back to my site!

Recently I have started doing searches for stolen images and have been surprised (and depressed) at how many instances I discovered. Last month I discovered a photographer in Australia had taken ~20 images from my site and placed them in his own galleries; when I contacted him (and his webhost) about this he claimed that the site was built for him by someone else, and he hadn’t realized that these were not his photos! This is typically the excuse given by the thieves.

I would be very interested in hearing about how this theft of text/photos is affecting other photographers, and participating in anything that might teach the thieves that there are serious consequences for this kind of behavior.

We’re not talking about your run-of-the-mill respectable & honest businessperson — we’re talking about someone with one or more defects, possibly a blindspot to the global internet. The cases Peter sited specifically do not seem this way — sound like sociopaths who have graduated beyond simpleton usage of facebook to actually trying to cultivate a larger online presence.

@AndrewG, I doubt very much that any respectable and honest business person will just leave everything to the web designer without approving the work first. Even if for some reason they missed it upon initial site launch, they would definitely check the site at some point. For someone to leave other peoples work on their blog/website for so long and then claim ignorance is just plain lies.