The OP runs a blog, which generates advertising revenue. The success of blogs is arguably 100% dependent on exclusive and quality content, which helps drive traffic, which increases ad revenue. A fair tradeoff would have been attribution to the OP and a link to his site, which I’d bet he would have been okay with. To simply take the image and use it without consent lowers the value of the OP’s content, since people don’t need to visit his site to access it.
Like others have said it happens all day every day. Easy case to win, hard to collect. I would love to see GCode skip all that drama and at least step up and send him some traffic and maybe free gear for review (that would still be a win for them).
How much did Glock charge you for using their gun in your photo? How much did the holster maker charge? Or do you think you can profit off of other folks products for your commercial ventures without paying licensing fees for such use?
Serious question. I worked for a well-known tech company and to use our products in similar photo shoots you had to pay licensing fees.
After they deleted the post I commented on, on their instagram page, I did not contact them again.
They were contacted in reference to this situation by others in the industry who understand this cannot be tolerated, I was CC’d and have yet to hear back.
That I honestly don’t know. I do know that fiscal compensation is rendered.
My gut tells me it doesn’t usually have to go as far as court because the offenders know they don’t have a leg to stand on. They company can prove where/when images originated.
Essentially if you’re posting photos online, you should keep the full resolution unedited photo somewhere if you don’t watermark it.
To a more malicious IP thief, watermarking isn’t enough as you can crop or otherwise remove a small watermark without too much issue usually.
But if you need to prove you took the photo, you can take another photo in the same location (if the location is prominent in the photo and not just a white backdrop…), with the same subject (if it’s a person or distinct thing, like with the same Glock which has unique wear marks), or provide the full resolution image. Because contrary to CSI, there is no “enhance” button in Photoshop and most people have 50billion megapixel cameras now days, but anything bigger than 1920x1080 is too big for mainstream Internet sharing, and usually even that’s way too big. You can also post un-photoshoped images if the photo was cropped to prove it as well.
The easiest way though is if you crop and resize your photos before sharing and save the original without uploading it, which you’ll probably end up doing anyway.
So you did not ask permission, and are completely ignorant of the licensing issues involved. You just decided you had a right to profit from their product because you bought one. But they do not have a right to-retweet, re-instagram, whatever an unmarked image they can reasonably believe was in the Public Domain since you chose not mark it. Gotcha.