I’m reporting abuse on the following page: http://pix.com.au/
Hi folks.
I’m the staff photographer for the Norwescon sci-fi/fantasy convention here in Seattle. As such, I keep an active Google search for ‘norwescon’ to find people mentioning us. Thanks to this search, I found this page, which was posting a shot I took at a past Norwescon and had posted to my personal account (before I volunteered as staff photographer).
Because I post my photos under a CC BY-NC-SA license, I posted a comment to their page requesting that they either edit the page to give me credit and link back to the Flickr page, or remove the photo from their site. Instead, they deleted my comment.
At that point, I did a little digging within the ‘girls’ category that the shot I found had been posted within, and discovered three more of my shots (one, original; two, original; and three, the original for this one has since been deleted from Flickr at my girlfriend’s request).
As my initial request for attribution was deleted and ignored, I have edited and replaced the photos in my Flickr account (and deleted one), thereby breaking the hotlink that the PixAustralia site was using to display the photos.
However, further searching has made it clear that the site is simply running Flickr searches for Creative Commons licensed shots tagged ‘schoolgirl’ and then embedding photo into posts within their ‘girls’ category. A few searches of post titles from the PixAustralia site repeatedly came up with the original photos on Flickr; most, if not all, of the shots I found were posted using CC licenses that require attribution, which has never been given.
As this is a site outside of your direct control, before I started this note, I posted comments on Flickr notifying some of the owners of the photos I was able to confirm as being stolen of the theft. However, I don’t have the time to do so for all of the shots. That’s when I thought I’d check your ‘Report Abuse’ link to see if you had an option for reporting abuse on third-party sites. I’m glad to see you do!
At this point, though I haven’t done the searches to confirm this, I think it’s safe to assume that most or all of the photos on the PixAustralia site, even outside of the ‘girls’ category where I found my images, are being posted in this same fashion and without attribution.
I realize that the site itself is outside of your control; however, anything that you can do to protect your users against this image theft (as far as I’m concerned, up to and including getting their hosting provider to disable their account, if possible) would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks very much!
Michael (djwudi) Hanscom