Theft of Intellectual Property
Musicians, artist and photographers are often the victim of theft of their creative work. Music for many years has seen the decline of traditional sales partially due to file sharing. Often, an artist's album may be available on the web in pirated form before it is available for purchase. In past years, people watched a live performance and the following day, if they found the artist to their liking, they would head to the record store to pick up a couple albums. Too often today, the fans have the artist's full library from some file sharing site on their storage device before they access their car for the ride home.
I guess it should not surprise me that images I post on Face Book or my website find their way onto people's personal pages. I often receive inquiries regarding usage or licensing which makes me pleased.
Then there are those occasions where one of my images appear on commercial sites without permission. A quick cease and desist note usually gets it removed or licensed. There is however a third group, where someone will lift an image, remove my watermark and replace it with another, then ignore request to remove the image. One such example is shown below. The image posted on the page is on the left, my original image is on the right. Is it too difficult to as for permission?
Update: November, 2015
Recently, Uriah Heep requested via their facebook page copies of photos and film from performances during the 1970s and 1980s. I responded wit a link to this post. The following morning, I received a reply from the band's management indicating the page on which this image was posted was a fan based page and not in any way connected to Uriah Heep or member Mick Box to whome the post was attributed. A quick check to the page link showed the page had been removed.
Since then, I have received another email from the band's archivist requesting permission to use the images, We are working on a way to make that happen.