The story of one stolen image here is pretty crazy.  It’s both disturbing, interesting, amazing, scary and infuriating all at the same time.  This type of story always plucks my heart strings, because I can relate to the way he’s feeling.  It just shows the power of the internet in this media age we are living in.  Any image you post online can end up anywhere… period.  Case closed.  I don’t care what you shot it with, how you designed it, digitized it, where you posted it, or what it is.  High res, medium res, or low res.  If the image is something of value to another person, or another person sees the potential value in it, it will be used.  It’s only a matter of time before it ends up all around the world.  Beware of how you share your work online.

Noam seems torn.  One one hand he is thrilled to see his art being embraced by so many people in so many places.  But, at the same time, he seems to get a pit in his stomach when he sees other people dishonestly making profits from his artwork.  When we license stock images, we sometimes get a kick out of where they end up.  Sometimes my head gets on billboards anywhere from Taiwan to Chicago.  Just yesterday an image of ours was featured on the Yahoo homepage.  It’s a really cool feeling.  These are images I know I have sold online, however.  In Noam’s case, the warm fuzzy feeling is short lived by feelings that are not so great.

In the stock photo industry, image theft has been a huge problem.  Newer technologies are helping to combat it, but it will still probably always be around to some degree or another. This is especially the case in illustration.  If you are a vector illustrator, you need to make sure you aren’t tracing photos that you didn’t produce on your own.  Otherwise, you are just as bad as the right clickers that steal images off of image sharing websites like flickr or deviantart.  Don’t think it won’t come back to bite you in the behind; because it will.

Ironically, when Noam thought he might try licensing the image himself through stock agencies, they rejected the image.  I got a chuckle out of this, because it honestly shows how ridiculously high the technical standards are in the business.  This screaming image was used hundreds, maybe even thousands of times all around the world – but no, the agency Noam submitted to didn’t feel it had any commercial value.  Hmm. Take a look at the top 100 on http://sxc.hu and you’ll notice that probably 50-75% of them would not even pass microstock standards… but they’re being downloaded and used all over the world, just like Noam’s screaming images.  It’s just something to think about, which is pretty ironic.  High quality standards are great.  I have them myself for my own stock photo website, as well as the others I submit to.  In this instance, it’s just ironic that poor Noam goes and tries to sell HIS OWN artwork and gets shot down, while hundreds or thousands of others are already using his photo all over.

Watermarked or not, images are still sometimes stolen.  Even still, it’s better than nothing.  Watermarking is the minimum precaution you can take to protect the images you do have online.  Not sharing them on the higher traffic websites like Flickr, is also a pretty good idea.  Be careful out there, because before you realize it your photos could be all over the place.

This stuff isn’t made up.  It’s real, and it happens.  This is just one story.  One person, who thankfully was informed about where his artwork ended up.  Is it his fault all of this happened?  What do you think about this story?  Has something like this ever happened to you?  Feel free to chime in with a comment below.

Learn more about Noam’s story: http://www.thestolenscream.com/ Check out his blog, and the products he’s got in his zazzle store.  Let’s support him – please.  He deserves it.  Helping him promote his story is the least I can do, as a fellow photographer.  You can follow Noam on twitter and facebook.

(video via FStoppers as also posted on the Chase Jarvis blog)

Tags: flickr, images, microstock, noam galai, photo theft, photographer, Photography, photos, stealing, stock photography, stolen, the stolen scream, tineye

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 8th, 2011 at 3:50 PM and is filed under Photography, Stock Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.