Plagiarism & My Photos on Facebook

["Philip Veerman" <>]

This is a concerning story and I am curious about some of the comments and that some describe it as illegal and what actually is the formal situation with this. I thought that using someone else's work in that way was only a breach of copyright if copyright was formally declared on the original work. Was that done here, is there some kind of presumption implied? Is that required? Otherwise why do books contain (or not) the advice about that a book is copyright? I wonder if posting a photo or to a chat line of itself does constitute any kind of enforceable rights. Seems a bit extreme to me. I would have thought if you choose to share it, it is then public. Of course mainly for reasons of accuracy and courtesy it should not be misused.

 

Then if so why are photos different from any text? I would have thought that without having formally declared copyright on the original, that worst that could be said is: it was rude to just copy it to somewhere else without asking. 

 

Philip

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Margaret Leggoe [
Sent: Sunday, 1 February 2015 7:33 PM
To: 'Julie Clark'
Cc:
Subject: [canberrabirds] Plagiarism

Dear Julie,

I have read your email and the responses concerning the illegal use of your photos, i.e. use without permission, which is a breach of copyright.

Google images has a search engine into which you can upload an image of yours and it will come up with all the websites where that image appears. 

I did that recently with a couple of photos of parrots that I had placed on the Internet Bird Collection website.  One search came up not with ten websites, but ten pages of websites, i.e. nearly 200 websites had taken and used my photo.  A little more than half had left my signature intact, only one had acknowledged that I was the author, and the rest had cropped off the signature/watermark, or superimposed their own logo over the top.  Few of these websites  had contact details, and many were in foreign languages.   And beware of some of these websites as I found out.  A couple were bait pages to lead you into filthy pornographic sites. 

As far as I can see, the only way to stop it is to not post your photos on the internet in the first place.

It seems we are trying to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Best wishes

Margaret Leggoe