Hi, My name is Alessandra Nicole and I won’t be bullied by petty thieves. See: http://www.photolaw.net/faq.html

It’s not the first time this year this has happened. An acquaintance of mine chose to use two of my older images on his Facebook and cropped out my watermark. I sent him a few quick notes simply asking that he remove them and use the ones with my watermark. His response was that he had “more important things to do than to engage in a back and forth” with me over some Facebook pictures.

Luckily there is a form on Facebook where you can report copyright infringement and they follow up within hours. I reported the images to Facebook and they were diligent and swift with removing the work from the offender’s profile. I quickly had him banned from my business page and “unfriended” him from my profile, as he was already posting needlessly nasty remarks on both.

He then sent a message to my email:

It can be difficult to keep up with work floating around on the world wide web, especially if you’ve maintained an online presence for a number of years. As photographers, we are entitled to go after image thieves for upwards of several hundred dollars per image under basic copyright laws. If the image is registered, it is then worth upwards of a thousand dollars per use. It behooves us to protect our business by having all of our work registered. More info on this from the American Society of Media Photographers website: http://asmp.org/tutorials/best-practices.html

What are some of your experiences with copyright infringement and image theft and what did you do about it? I’m compiling research for an article. Please share your stories with me at [email protected] and put “INFRINGED” in the subject line.