How to find out your photos / graphics are being used somewhere else?

[9AM]

I heard there's a way to find out through the web log or something but I have no idea how to do it. Please help.

Thanks.

[palmertires]

One way to track images is through digital watermarking.

http://www.digimarc.com/watermark/

There might be a way to do it that does not involve the added expense of this service, but I don't know about it.

[wizard]

Look up Hotlinking, you might find some ways of preventing it.

When an image is hot linked it is being used straight from your server... therefore stealing your bandwidth.

There's no real way of protecting your images, because anyone can save them and upload them to their own servers... hot link protection just keeps them from being used from your servers.

[palmertires]

I was interested in doing some more research on your question, and found some interesting things. Hotlinking is only one way someone might attempt to use your images, though serious enough since it interferes with your bandwidth, it appears there are ways to prevent or foil the person attempting to do this. It is very simple for someone to right-click > Save As when they find an image they want (we used this technique as a way to get images to work on in an early Photoshop class I took). Your image is now on their hard-drive. They might be using it as wallpaper on their desktop, or worse, they might be using it on their website or some other medium with no credit given to the actual owner of the image, you. Tsk! Tsk! It happens often enough, and in most cases, the person doing it is unaware of the potential copyright infringement. As has been said many times, publishing your work on the web also opens up the possibility of your work being misappropriated.

There are several things that can be done:

-Always include a Terms of Use statement on your website. You can look at other sites to find examples of these, and pay attention to the key points. Then, sit down and write your own. Basically, it should be noted who owns the site, the site's content including images, logos, etc. and what rights are being granted to the user by accessing the site. You will note, on some sites that offer content such as White Papers, a license is granted to copy and sometimes distribute the content for certain purposes. Anyway, I'm getting a little technical...if you really want to dig into the legalese of copyright you can always visit the U.S. Copyright Office website for in-depth explanation of terms and concepts. You may also want to consider registering your work (your website as one creative work). This adds a level of protection if you should have to resort to litigation...

http://www.copyright.gov/

-Create a logo in Photoshop or some other image editor that can be applied to all of your images. It should not interfere with the image, but should be perceptible to the human eye. If someone saves your image to their hard drive, your logo goes with it. One disadvantage to this is that the logo can be removed. For an example of logos in images visit the Corbis site (you will need to click around until you get to a non-linked image to see the logo):

http://pro.corbis.com/default.aspx

-Invest in digital watermarking software and subscribe to a service that offers to track your images on the web. Disadvantages to this method include the added expense, the ability for a knowledgeable person to disable the embedded watermark, and that only web images will be tracked. But, if you want to do everything you can do this is as serious as it gets. I found useful information at this site, in addition to links to some of the major watermarking services:

http://www.ohiomemory.org/om/digwatermarkfaq.html

Happy reading!