TopMember

Models,

Anyone else noticed that their photos are being stolen and put onto social networking sites to create fake profiles?
This is the fourth one I've caught (obviously there may be more);
www.tagged.com/profile.html?uid=5453210244
Is anyone else having this problem?
I know that there's not much I can do but contact the site hosts and alert them to the problem but it's just so frustrating.
I have to say, it also makes me a bit uneasy.
Job hazard, weird compliment or just plain creepy?

Aly.

Manager

Hi Alyce,

Its not something limited to models, I know several people on Facebook who have had all of their images stolen and made into a fake profile - and not just girls either.

Its one of those wars that isn't likely to be won, because technology works against you.
When you view a webpage, a lot of the information (images, javascript, flash content etc) is saved on your computer in the "cache" folder. This means that if websites were to use the "no-right-click" trick, the images can still be grabbed from the cache anyway, or from looking in the pages source code, and the "no-right-click" trick is a bit of a poor one as its still very easy to use the right click button.

There are a few other ways of attempting to protect images, I believe there was a script out there that would clear the page viewers paste bin every time they viewed a page, but that's not very member/viewer-friendly.
Its also possible to make the photo the background of a "div" element, which makes it harder in certain browsers to find the photo as you would have to go through the source code.

We have recently updated the gallery to make it harder for people to steal images, in the hope that anyone attempting to will get bored of the long process it would take to get the images, but as I said above - its a war that isn't likely to be won.

So unfortunately, as you said, theres very little that can be done apart from reporting those profiles as and when they pop up.

Might also be worth checking out this website: tineye.com - I've used it on a few occasions and found stolen photos through there. Its only drawback is that its only indexed a tiny part of the web so far as its quite new.

James

Premium

Unfortunately yes. It's a job hazard, but creepy and illegal.

I noticed the website you linked to is an American one. I've had this happen on an American site before and found the following information useful:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act

It basically explains how websites in the USA are legally protected if someone steals a photo and illegally posts it online (as they have no way of knowing if it's being posted by the copyright holder or someone who owns usage rights), but that if you report it they have to take reasonable steps to contact the person that posted it and sort the whole mess out (if they don't they're committing a federal offense and can get done for it). Usually the person that posted it will just take it down because they know they could get done for fraud or who knows what, but sometimes they refuse and you have to file an official DMCA take-down notice and the whole thing gets complicated. I'm not the best one to explain it, so have a read of the article.

Every country has different laws, so the action required is different depending on which country is hosting the site. But the laws broken range from copyright theft (as in the UK the copyright is held by the photographer) to fraud - especially if the person is pretending to be you and starts selling, for example, signed (forged) prints of you (if they can upload the pic they can print it).

Anyway, I find this problem to be rampant online, but I say go after them as it will give you a strange sense of satisfaction when someone has to actually do something about it. It's a bit of a grass roots effort to somewhat (albeit minutely) control the situation, but as the alternative is to sit and watch it happen, I personally go after them.

Hope this helps a bit!

TopMember

Thanks to both of you James and Nixie.

Yeah, unfortunately I've had to make a profile with the website, make a confirmation picture (a recent picture of me holding a bit of paper with my name, the time and date) and after staying up until midnight last night to do all of this her webpage is still up.
Needless to say, I'm pretty pissed.

Yeah, luckily I know my rights here because I studied journalism so I'm perfectly aware of the copyright laws (which I quoted in my message to the site admins) but regardless of this it seems to still be an immensely slow process.

And yes James, this happened to my twice before I started modelling too. It's unbelievable.
For one, I can't get my head round why people would want to do this?
It just leaves me feeling very violated afterwards. It's such a horrible thing to do.
Maybe this is what being a marketing model feels like? Haha!

Thanks again! x

Unfortunately it is the way of the world nowadays !!

I honestly cant understand how people live there lives
openly on the likes of facebook ? They really do put
themselves in the firing line when it comes to identity
theft.

Hi Alyce.
Could you forward me a copy of the copyright laws please?
Thank you.
Tony.