In this episode, we dive into the issues of theft, plagiarism, copyright infringement — and just plain old backstabbing as it pertains to sharing your work and presence on the internet today. I’ll be joined by Jake Hicks and Troy Miller to tackle this important topic.

Jake Hicks: http://www.jakehicksphotography.com

Troy Miller: http://www.spicyjello.com

Jakes tutorial on RGG EDU: 

https://rggedu.com/products/long-exposure-portraits-with-jake-hicks-rgg-edu-photography-tutorial-color-gel

Some anecdotes from Jake Hicks:

A couple of years ago I shared just some of my image thefts in this article and how to get companies like Pixsy to find and stop them:

How Google Alerts can be set up to alert you of others using your name, even in copyright dead-zones like China and formerly Turkey where companies like Pixsy do not tread.

One of the more popular composite images using one of my images as part of it. If an image is recognizable as yours, even as part of a composite, do you own still own the copyright?

It’s worth recognizing how different the copyright laws are around the world. For example, your US laws are very different from our UK laws. Here’s a link to UK copyright as it pertains the photographer:

Watermarking or not? I embed my contact details into the metadata instead. It’s not the same but well worth doing and it’s very easy to do. Here’s how to do it Lightroom.

The reason for this is that recent legislation changed that stated “'Photographs or other creative works can be used without the owners' explicit permission as long as a "diligent search" has taken place'. Marking your image in some way whether it is visible or not is crucial.

Lastly, a story of how my community closed down a serial image thief last year on Instagram. The sad truth is that although we got him banned, he’s now back again with exactly the same name and stolen images on his account only a few months later. Do social media networks like Instagram actually care about image theft?