So, I just realized a company in California has stolen my images and content, claimed them as their own and placed them on their business site selling ponds and fountains. I am pretty fricken pissed about this whole thing. They do not have an e-mail contact, so I will be calling them Monday asking them to please remove my images from their e-commerce site, otherwise I will be forced to take legal action.
I want to encourage anyone to NOT purchase anything from columbiawatergardens.com as these are the thieves who have stolen my images.
I will be placing watermarks on all my images from this point forward. I fucking hate people.
9 comments:
That sucks! I appreciate knowing about these jerks, though. Good luck with your phone call tomorrow.
Lee, they do have email. At the bottom of their page there is a "Send Us Feedback" link; when I click on it, it opens to email with the address Sales@ColumbiaWaterGardens.com. I recently found a Mexican website had stolen a travel photo of mine (from my Flickr page, clearly marked © All Rights Reserved) to illustrate their enchiladas potosinos recipe! I emailed them and they took it right down. Hope the same goes for you.
Iris,
Yeah, these guys are clearly jerks, my bet is that many other images on this site are stolen as well. Boo. Bad business.
Caroline,
Thanks! I missed that link, I just sent them a cease and desist e-mail, if that doesn't work, I have a list of other actions I can leverage to get them to pull down my images.
What's particuarly fun is that if your right-click an image on their site it says "Sorry our images are copyrighted." Which is true, just not copyrighted by them.
Honestly as annoying as it is, it's part of publishing online. It probably won't be last time it happens to you.
That is infuriating! I'm sorry it happened to you. They also have a facebook fan page, if you want to write something on their page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/San-Jacinto-CA/Columbia-Water-Gardens/135584389845
Matt,
Yeah, I saw that too. How nice - jerks. And yes, I realize it is part of publishing on the web, but it still pisses you off when it happens.
Tina,
They did finally pull down my content after 2 e-mails. I will be doing a thorough digging through their site to make sure all my images and content are completely removed. What a pain in the ass. Jeez.
I was wondering how you ever found out they were ripping off your images? Did you just happen to go to their site by chance? It would be cool if there was software that would search the web for the EXIF tags or your own digital watermark of your images and alert you when it finds them on sites that are not your own. Or maybe there already is such a program.
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