sorry about that...

as far as I can tell, the Tribe staff have pretty much given up on policing the site and protecting us all from the a&&holes...

if you can get a lawyer and nail this tool....I will be cheering for you!

It definitely is a case of copyright infringement when someone posts an image to which you own the copyright (which you do as soon as you click the button). But, it's kinda like going 66 in a 65 mph zone. Especially for web-sized images. As someone else mentioned, if you don't want your images to escape, don't post them.

You will not find any full size images of mine anywhere that you can copy -- but you can order prints -- real prints at full resolution, not the crap you'd get if you printed them from here. The images I post here and elsewhere are all web sized and almost always include my name and a copyright notice. Several of my friend on here use my photos for their main image and I have no problem whatsoever with that -- it's free advertising. More and more, people ask me first, or ask me when I take the picture.

Education: So when I see a profile with fantastic images, photographic or whatever, with no attribution, I always ask if the poster is the creator. I've noticed that slowly, more and more people are crediting the images they post here.

The TOU of Tribe doesn't protect you in the first place , also someone said consult a lawyer even if the image is registered copyright lawyers are extremely expensive and won't be worth your time , the only time you want to go that route is when your image has been unlicensed for a large campaign . APA and the Canadian equivalent CAPIC are fighting hard to institute better copyright laws for image makers. I would highly suggest you support one or both of them in order for them to help you !

All the best and watermark , watermark , watermark. I know it sucks and wreck a beautiful image but that is really the only way and even that can be photoshoped to protect yourself.

I had a few minutes to I thought I was address is issue in more depth. First and foremost, the only way to 100% guarantee that your image won’t be stolen is to either not take the image at all, or to never make it public. Other than that, if it’s out there, someone will steal it. They may take it for their desktop wallpaper, or for their website, but in either case, if they want it, they are going to get it.

Now when I first started posting images to the net, which was back in 2001 and almost a million images ago (Yep that’s a real number) I used to get really upset when I would come across someone who had stolen my image. Most of the time, not only were they using it without my permission, but they would hot link it on their site, so I had to pay for the bandwidth of my image being used without my permission. I would send them emails letters, DCMA takedown notices, and while most of the time it worked, it consumed a lot of my time and emotional energy. There were a few nights I actually didn’t sleep because I was so angry over the whole situation, and then reality set it.

To me it’s just not worth pursuing or even thinking about, especially when most of the image thefts occurred in a non commercial fashion, for example. I just looked and currently show almost 50 different sites which have linked to this image.

www.deviantdonkey.info/v1/gal...dex.php

Does that suck? Yep! Does it make me angry? Nope, I don’t really care. I could send take down notices to both them and their ISP or hosting company, but why bother… My basic take on it is that it’s a compliment. Someone liked my phone enough to re-post it. I could slow it down by not allowing hot links off my site but once again, I tried that, people would just steal the whole image and I don’t know where it is now. So here is what I do.

1. Make sure that every image I have has my copyright information in the Meta Data.

2. I specifically name my images so I can look for them in Google images. Most people who steal images are lazy and probably won’t bother to change the name of the image.

3. I move my directories around or my image names regularly so that it breaks people who have hot linked to my site. Since I am a network engineer, this is pretty simple for me; it may not be for you.

4. When I find an image on another site, I look at the site. If it’s non-commercial or at least a site where I am not totally against its content, I will generally just do nothing.

5. If the site looks like it may get high traffic and for some bizarre reason I want to try to get some of their traffic, I will contact the site owner and basically tell them it’s ok to use the image as long as you publically credit me and my site for the image and link the image back to my site. This has really worked well for me and makes life much simpler.
I know these things suck, and it really extra sucks to put your heart and soul into an image to only have some lame ass person steal it.. Such is life.. Really it’s not worth getting upset over..

On a final note, commercial use is another thing… Commercial use, immediately the company gets a letter from my attorney with the cost of using the photo. Period. This is just my take on the subject; you may have a different take on it, but in the end… It’s only a photo…..

I flagged the photo and he re-posted,,,we played that
game for a while and then he more or less gave me credit

his profile name is trinsic and its the profile photo of the wolf

thanks all, this is a great tribe, watermark seems the way to go