Missing piece © Carsten Reisinger
I recommend to sit down for an hour every month or so to do some research of your own images how much they’ve “spread” on the internet.
There are a couple of ways how you can check for your images online that shouldn’t be there…
First, I use Tineye. Tineye is using a software to index images found online on any given web site. As the web is quite “big” Tineye won’t ever be able to index all images online but there is a chance you will find some of your images.
With their plug-in you can either right-click on your image (or any other image) online or upload a medium resolution image on their homepage and have Tineye perform an online search for duplicates. It will list all the web sites that contain the same image or even slightly manipulated versions of your image. From there you can “investigate” and see if license terms have been violated or your copyright has been infringed.
Worst case scenario is that the same image is on sale at another Microstock agency, uploaded by another contributor!
Secondly you can use any search engine’s image search such as:
http://images.search.yahoo.com/
Use keywords that you included in your IPTC data to find your image. A good thing with Bing is that when one of your images is found (at an agency) then you can hover over that search result and click on “Show similar images”. That way you can receive more targeted results.
Please note, that these image searches don’t indicate “copyright infringement”. It’s up to you or a lawyer to determine if any licensing terms have been violated.
P.S. I’m not an attorney and this information is not intended to be interpreted as legal advice. This article is supposed to be helpful to you in order to protect your copyright. Always consult an attorney to get professional advice!
it really works?sometimes even i do that that seems to bother me.. that my images are stolen and scattered over the net…