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Stop stealing my images

The shot I made of a lion charging is without a doubt popular. Unfortunately that also means that publishers, or cunning business people think they can just steal it and make the image work for them. I’ve seen it appearing as screen savers, iPad covers, iPhone covers, buttons, pacifiers (!), and used in many more shapes and forms.

And here it is again.
My most stolen image on the cover of national newspaper El Observador, Uruguay. Stolen. Again. #stopstealingmyimages

El Observador, Uruguay

Another fine example: an official app, for sale in the Itunes-store. A complaint to Apple resulted in more more than a standards reply “we will check this for you” but of course nothing has changed and they are still using my charging lion as the icon.

App with stolen lion picture

2 comments

  1. Anette Mossbacher says:

    Hi Marsel,

    that images get stolen never will stop, but there are little things you can do, to make it less happen. I have as well a ‘most’ stolen travel image. Found it just everywhere around the globe. Even on government websites, added new watermarks, or on org websites, you name it and last not least, one single ‘borrowed’ image between with credit and link back to my site. And this image I let them use for their website. Anyway, I wrote a blog post about my most stolen image, what I do, that I let the image remove from websites using this or that and much more. Since I posted this blog post it got less, much less of stolen images. It is also one of my highly viewed post all year around! Maybe this helps. To stop the wallpaper hand out crap, disable hot-linking in your website. It can be done. So all images which been hot-linked in the past, that string will be suddenly cut. It was a bliss for me to see suddenly in websites with my image, that a little blue square with the ‘?’ in it was my image :) This saved me lots of work or claiming a DMCA or more. All this does not prevent 100% the stealing, but it cuts it down in the number for the future. Good luck

    Ciao
    Anette

    1. Marsel van Oosten says:

      Hi Annette – thank you for your feedback, much appreciated. We are working on disabling right-clicking on all the images on our website, and we will look into disabling hot-linking as well. Thank you.

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