As I was looking at my referrer stats today, I noticed some suspicious traffic from a pet website. I visited the site and looked around and found that they were using one of my photos. Most of my images are Creative Commons licensed for non-commercial use, but this was a commercial website. I contacted them and explained that as their website was clearly commercial (they had a shopping cart and were selling products, for crying out loud; it was not at all ambiguous), their use of my image was in violation of my license.
I got a message back from them saying that, while they’d removed my image, they had not violated my license, as they weren’t selling products with my image on them. Um, yeah, that would be a flagrant violation of my license, but that’s not the only way to define commercial use. Placing my image anywhere on their commercial website is, you know, commercial use, as it’s meant to drive traffic and ultimately garner sales.
The worst part of it, though, was that they’d chosen a terrible photo. If you’re going to steal something, at least make sure you steal something nice.
red paper boat 