A question for photographers

[quilby]

Would you pay about 50$ a month for a web service that would track where your photos are being used on the internet?
If you know tineye.com, it would be sort of like that. But you would be allowed to upload as many photos as you would like. The service will crawl the whole web every day, and when it finds one of your photos being used it would send you an email.

What do you think about such a web service? Do you have any advice / features you would like to add?
How much would you be willing to pay for something like this?
How helpful will it be to you?

Thanks for your time!

[David_Buzzard]

No Way.

If you're worried about someone poaching your photos off the web, use Flash based galleries. With those, you can't extract the separate photos from the gallery.

David Buzzard

[MathewLodge]

David: not really true -- I can just hit "Alt-Print Screen" and I'll have a copy of your flash gallery photo in the clipboard.

My experience is that most of the time the folks who rip off your photos on the web do it because they are not going to pay for any photo. So they steal one when, most of the time, they could license it for web use for less than $200 -- hardly a large sum for most businesses. The perps typically replace my photo with another one they got free somewhere else.

It's an interesting question for a service like this: most usage that would be worth prosecuting today happens in the physical world because of the dollar value of the image when used in those situations: a book or magazine, a direct mail piece etc. But with more and more business moving to the web, collecting from businesses that can pay ought to be more and more feasible.

So, if for $50/month you are also going automate the issue of DCMA Takedowns and do collections for the unlicensed use (with a split on any money collected)... then I'd be interested.

[David_Buzzard]

You can take a screen capture of anything on the web. What you don't get with a screen capture is any of the ITCP data, or any of the code in the original Photoshop file, which is probably what that web crawler goes after.

Going after someone for swiping a shot off the web is the definition of futile. You have to get your money up front, then hand over your images.

David Buzzard

[Noel_Carboni]

The service will crawl the whole web every day

Impossible. No one has that much bandwidth. It may crawl parts of the web every day, and try to crawl the whole web, but it can't do both.

However, the service may well be legitimate. I've used TinEye to find a number of surprising uses for my images, especially those posted by NASA. On the other hand, I've had as many people who know my work write to me to say, "hey, someone in Alaska is using your image in a newspaper" as I've found via a web search.

Honestly, I don't think I'd pay for that service.

-Noel