I don't mind the exposure but on some of the charity stuff I've done (where I let people right click and download the images for free) I may have to post some explicit legalese basically letting any potential photography.com viewer know that the photos cannot be used for any commercial use whatsoever (i.e. no release forms were obtained) or just disable right click and watermark it all.
After going through the 1,000, it looks like about half are watermarked; the first 75 or so look to have been 'chopped' so the watermark doesn't show up but the rest that show up without watermark were either mined (initially I didn't watermark the thumbs but decided to do so) or they obtained them some other way. There are also a number of repeated shots showing watermarked versions (for a brief time I put the watermark dead center but didn't like it aesthetically so put the watermark on the bottom of the image) and un-watermarked versions of the same image.
I did not see any images from my private galleries. Like Andy stated a few pages back, I do find the discussion very interesting.
And, while appreciating the exposure, I will have to think about any potential liabilities (wasn't there a case recently where a company used an image on Flickr or some other photo site that was posted with a Creative Commons license but the subjects of the image hadn't agreed to that and/or signed release forms? And then they sued someone/everyone involved?).
I think for now I will watermark and right-click protect my oh-so-valuable photos of the Inaugural Charity Chili Cook-off that we held this summer at my day job (Hi-Time Wine Cellars... hitimewine.net - we raised about $10,000 for the local Boys & Girls Club)
<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> I have asked a VERY VERY simple question! What is the legal principle here that would allow these companies to use copyrighted material without first obtaining approval from the copyright holder? Can anyone answer this?
Sam<o:p></o:p>
I guess we don't have many lawyers on this forum...[you can supply your own lawyer joke here].
Sam, there may be no legal justification. But I'm not sure there is any legal recourse here either unless they actually refuse to remove your pics after you have given them notice. I think this is all covered by the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). I suppose you could sue them, but you would need to demonstrate that you have actually suffered some damage as a result of their infringement. I looked at the page source of a search that returned my pics, and they are not hot-linking to my thumbs--they have their own copies stored somewhere. So they are not stealing my bandwidth (unlike some other sites that do). Warning: I am not a lawyer, so don't pay much attention to me.
Have you requested/demanded that they remove links to your site?
Mine was passworded from day dot...maybe 3-4 years. Signed out..still got access to the album...changed the entire album over to a new title & could still see the album.
The album containing your brisbane photos that I'm referencing is public. With public keywords that you've put in, which are meant to make the photo be found.
I don't mind the exposure but on some of the charity stuff I've done (where I let people right click and download the images for free) I may have to post some explicit legalese basically letting any potential photography.com viewer know that the photos cannot be used for any commercial use whatsoever (i.e. no release forms were obtained) or just disable right click and watermark it all.
<SNIP>
And, while appreciating the exposure, I will have to think about any potential liabilities (wasn't there a case recently where a company used an image on Flickr or some other photo site that was posted with a Creative Commons license but the subjects of the image hadn't agreed to that and/or signed release forms? And then they sued someone/everyone involved?).
I am not a lawyer, but from my understanding of the need for model releases you would not be liable for the use by another party of an unreleased image, unless you had made a false claim as the released status of that image. According to Dan Heller's very thorough discussion of model releases at http://www.danheller.com/model-release it is the "user" of a photograph that is responsible for verifying that all necesary releases have been obtained.
Normally the photographer obtains a release because it would often times be almost impossible for the user wanting to use that photograph to track down and obtain the release. Therefore without the release the photograph is less commercially valuable and therefore less like to make the photographer money, so it make sense for the photographer to obtain the release.
Where you can get yourself into trouble is if you make some claim that the photograph is released. For example may stock websites allow you to flag images as commercial or editorial when you upload them, and state that any image that is flagged as commercial needs to have all the apropriate releases. The stock company makes the claim to all of the users of the site that any commercial image is fully released. If you were to flag an image as commercial that did not have the appropriate releases and the purchaser were to be sued they could go after the stock company, and the stock company after you for making false claims about the released status of the images.
You guys can colour it any way you want. At the end of the day..someone is using something of mine to make money & before i get the 20 answers telling me its an elixsure & to embrace it ...i dont need nor want my photography to make money, thats not what its all about for me. If that was so i would most certainly be in a soup line at this very moment (like a most of you also).
BTW andy...i havnt got my nickers in a not over it, to be honest i find it mildly annoying at worst...im smart enough to understand what this crap costs to chase down and halt on the net.
While it could be argued that photography.com is using something of yours to make money, I think they would argue that it is the quality of their search results that drives people to their site and makes them money, not the individual images belonging to any one photographer. Google provides a search service for web pages that includes an excerpt of a web page, and photography.com provides a search service for photographs that includes a thumbnail of the image. The vast majority of people don't take issue with google indexing and even caching their web pages, or posts they make on online forums, both of which are copyrighted, even if no explicit claim of copyright is made. Google makes money by providing search results for web pages (and now images too). If we replace web page with photograph and google with photography.com we have the situation we are currently discussing, and I have a hard time seeing how legally or morally this situation is any different than that of google and web pages. For that matter if you had discovered that images.google.com had pictures of yours (which as Andy pointed out earlier in the thread they do) would you be upset about google having these images? Photography.com just seems to do a better job of finding the images than images.google.com.
With regard to halting this on the net, unless you are using some generally accepted way to prevent your images from being indexed (robots meta tags for example) then according to U.S. law (which considering the images are being hosted in the U.S. probably has primary although I don't know for sure) you don't really have a legal leg to stand on regarding halting their display, based on the link that Mike Lane posted earlier (http://stinet.dtic.mil/oai/oai?&verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA471337). Now if photography.com is indexing images that they shouldn't be - and keep in mind private galleries on smugmug aren't really protected, all the private setting does is keep it from showing up on your homepage there are still lots of ways for search engine to come across it (for example tracking back through a link here on dgrin to an image in a private gallery), protected in my opinion means passworded or blocked off by SmugIslands - then you might have a legal leg to stand on.
Now if photography.com is indexing images that they shouldn't be - and keep in mind private galleries on smugmug aren't really protected, all the private setting does is keep it from showing up on your homepage there are still lots of ways for search engine to come across it (for example tracking back through a link here on dgrin to an image in a private gallery), protected in my opinion means passworded or blocked off by SmugIslands - then you might have a legal leg to stand on.
As Andy has pointed out, some of the posters are usings keywords on the images. So I would suggest if you want to lower your search profile AND not put all your images into SmugIslands or Private Galleries, don't use keywords, which are specifically used to index any data element, not just pictures. Strip all keywords out if the meta data on the image, and use non-descript titles on your images: image_001 or BS001, not "Blue Ship on Horizon with Setting Orange Sun in Thailand".
Hope that helps!
"Don't ask me what I think of you, I might not give the answer that you want me to. Oh well."
-Fleetwood Mac
I think everyone is making this way to complicated. Here in the USA the 9th Circuit Court has rendered a decision that states companies like photography.com can use thumbnails in a profit making business, and they, the court, consider this to be fair use. Please note there is no distiction that I could find with reference to private, public, and or pass word protected type of site.
I disagree!
But lets look at this from my view point.
Andy, and his crowd are happy as live turkeys the day after Thanksgiving. Gus and the gang are mighty peeved.
Why don't we rule in favor of individual rights? It's your image, you decide if you want these companies to display your images or not.
The Happy turkey's can give their approval, and the peeved ones don't.
OK the companies that want to benefit, and earn money from the use of these images will need to do some additional work, but hey, they are the ones making money off this.
Everybody gets what they want, and the individual's rights are maintained.
Wow!
I just found this thread... Decided to check.. Sure enough, both my last name and my website name brings a lot of my SM-stored images.
To their merit, though, they all lead to *my* actual webpages, so it's not like they are selling on my behalf, at this point I'm leaning to view it as an extra exposure...
I think everyone is making this way to complicated. Here in the USA the 9th Circuit Court has rendered a decision that states companies like photography.com can use thumbnails in a profit making business, and they, the court, consider this to be fair use. Please note there is no distiction that I could find with reference to private, public, and or pass word protected type of site.
The distinction as I see it is that if you used a "generally accepted" method to request that your site not be indexed than the indexer should be obligated to attempt to abide by that. In the footnotes of the Kelly v. Arriba decision (http://pub.bna.com/ptcj/99-560.htm) robots.txt is mentioned, however no legal judgement is made regarding Arriba's obligation to abide by it, as the photographer never made use of it.
Why don't we rule in favor of individual rights? It's your image, you decide if you want these companies to display your images or not.
The Happy turkey's can give their approval, and the peeved ones don't.
OK the companies that want to benefit, and earn money from the use of these images will need to do some additional work, but hey, they are the ones making money off this.
Everybody gets what they want, and the individual's rights are maintained.
Yes, yes, I know............way to simple.
Sam
There is actually a fairly reasoned paper on the benefits and costs of opt-out with respect to the online world at http://law.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5034&context=expresso. What it comes down to in my opinion is that there is no legal distinction and in my opinion there should be no legal distinction between a phtotograph and a webpage, both are a copyrighted item. In that case what you advocated could be restated "OK the companies *such as google* that want to benefit, and earn money from the use of these *webpages* will need to do some additional work, but hey, they are the ones making money off this." (*my rewording*) In other words google would have to contact the owner of every web page that it wants to include in its search results and request their permission. If that were the case google would be just about worthless, as there is no reasonable way to get the majority of website owners to opt-in to being indexed. The case of website indexing, including imaging, is one in my opinion where the benefits, both economic and social, of requiring an affirmative act in order to opt-out outweigh the costs to the individuals.
we're all playing in a great big sandbox called the World Wide Web and I can't believe anyone would get so ticked off because they got a grain or two of sand in their knickers.
the mere fact that you create and post things to the web renders your stuff everyone's stuff. sure there are steps one can take to protect aspects of your rights but by and large you take a calculated risk with your participation on the internet.
thankfully smugmug has provided several ways to enhance security settings. take a gander over at flickr and see how many people there complain about stolen images; real images, not just thumbnails.
if you don't want search engines, any search engine, finding your stuff then just eliminate any keywords from your site. this web belongs to everyone and keywords are the oil that lubricates the engine. you use keywords, you are putting the word out to anyone "come find me". period the end.
you can not play in everyone's sandbox and change the rules. stop using keywords - make galleries private - stop anyone from finding you, unless you give them a map.
the mere fact that you create and post things to the web renders your stuff everyone's stuff.
stop using keywords - make galleries private - stop anyone from finding you, unless you give them a map.
Angelo,
I agree heartily with everything you say, with one exception. If you really don't want the search engines to find you I think you are better off setting your albums to Hello World! -> No. A private gallery that a search engine stumbles across (maybe because you post a link to the gallery in a discussion on dgrin) will still be indexed, however a public gallery with Hello World! set to No should not be indexed if the search engine is behaving properly. From a quick test I did it appears that setting Hello World to No causes smugmug to include the robots meta information that requests that search engines not index a pag in the HTML header...
we're all playing in a great big sandbox called the World Wide Web and I can't believe anyone would get so ticked off because they got a grain or two of sand in their knickers.
the mere fact that you create and post things to the web renders your stuff everyone's stuff. sure there are steps one can take to protect aspects of your rights but by and large you take a calculated risk with your participation on the internet.
thankfully smugmug has provided several ways to enhance security settings. take a gander over at flickr and see how many people there complain about stolen images; real images, not just thumbnails.
if you don't want search engines, any search engine, finding your stuff then just eliminate any keywords from your site. this web belongs to everyone and keywords are the oil that lubricates the engine. you use keywords, you are putting the word out to anyone "come find me". period the end.
you can not play in everyone's sandbox and change the rules. stop using keywords - make galleries private - stop anyone from finding you, unless you give them a map.
Very true, Angelo, very true.
I guess my only grudge with them would be that they do not position themselves as a search engine, but as a hosting site/stock photo agency.
At least that was my impression when I first saw the site, I could be wrong.
With that assumption, finding one's images presented in a way as if they are part of the site's portfolio (i.e. surrounded by the site's own paraphernalia) can be discouraging... Especially taking into account that all those aforementioned images come as a result of a "stock photo search", which kinda implies all these pictures are stock images from this site...
Imagine the following situation: I dedicate a portion of my site to the Landscape photography and on the front page of that portion I will put Marc's images thumbnails. Next I create Wildlife section and put Harry's thumbnails all over there. Macro section will be using Brian's thumbs, Portraits will get a bunch of thumbs from Yuri and Wedding section - some thumbnails of Shay's.
All those thumbnails would lead to the respective owner's sites, and I will not be selling them myself.
Would they, however, play an advertisement/luring role to engage people to go deeper to *my* site and explore more, or maybe simply make their decision right then and there an call *my* number, conveniently located right next to those "borrowed" thumbnail images?
And how long, counting in minutes, do you think I'll be still a member of smugmug/dgrin community if I did something like this and this fact became public?
I agree heartily with everything you say, with one exception. If you really don't want the search engines to find you I think you are better off setting your albums to Hello World! -> No. A private gallery that a search engine stumbles across (maybe because you post a link to the gallery in a discussion on dgrin) will still be indexed, however a public gallery with Hello World! set to No should not be indexed if the search engine is behaving properly. From a quick test I did it appears that setting Hello World to No causes smugmug to include the robots meta information that requests that search engines not index a pag in the HTML header...
I was making generic references and not alluding to specific smugmug steps
I guess my only grudge with them would be that they do not position themselves as a search engine, but as a hosting site/stock photo agency.
I didn't really see it that way; if you look on their home page they clearly distinguish between member photos and stock photos, and they also provide articles on topics related to photography and product reviews. They are really a little bit of everything related to photography.
When you go to the stock photos page, it states "The Photography.com search engine allows users to access millions of photographs from multiple online photographic resources. A single photo search query allows up-to-the-minute photo retrieval from independent resources and companies from the BBC to the New York Times." Also the box in the lower right mentions "featured" sources such as Fotolia and iStockphoto.
I didn't really see it that way; if you look on their home page they clearly distinguish between member photos and stock photos, and they also provide articles on topics related to photography and product reviews. They are really a little bit of everything related to photography.
When you go to the stock photos page, it states "The Photography.com search engine allows users to access millions of photographs from multiple online photographic resources. A single photo search query allows up-to-the-minute photo retrieval from independent resources and companies from the BBC to the New York Times." Also the box in the lower right mentions "featured" sources such as Fotolia and iStockphoto.
I don't find any of that misleading.
Nik it'd be like you scouring not just Marc's, Yuri's, et al sites and putting their thumbs on your site proclaiming to be in the stock photo business. It'd be like you proclaiming clearly on your homepage that you're a great place to find stock photography from lots of different sources and then going out and scouring the web for thousands or millions of different photographs from many, many different sources and then providing a means of displaying, searching, and linking them from your site.
There is a big difference between what photography.com does and your analogy.
Y'all don't want to hear me, you just want to dance.
Nik it'd be like you scouring not just Marc's, Yuri's, et al sites and putting their thumbs on your site proclaiming to be in the stock photo business. It'd be like you proclaiming clearly on your homepage that you're a great place to find stock photography from lots of different sources and then going out and scouring the web for thousands or millions of different photographs from many, many different sources and then providing a means of displaying, searching, and linking them from your site.
There is a big difference between what photography.com does and your analogy.
"Kill a few and they call you a murderer; kill millions and they call you a conquerer".
Or, in this case, "steal a few pictures and they call you a thief; steal millions and they call you photography.com".
"Kill a few and they call you a murderer; kill millions and they call you a conquerer".
Or, in this case, "steal a few pictures and they call you a thief; steal millions and they call you photography.com".
It's more than just a scale issue.
And in any case, their activities have been ruled to be fair use by the courts. So the point is moot.
Y'all don't want to hear me, you just want to dance.
Please note there is no distiction that I could find with reference to private, public, and or pass word protected type of site.
I disagree!
The HTML spec allows any website to tell certain visitors (robots, spiders, etc.) to stay out - using robots.txt. Courts have ruled that if a search engine follows the rules a site owner sets down in robots.txt, then it is allowed to search (and cache, index, etc.) all sites that don't prohibit this action by using robots.txt. The reasoning is that it is impractical for every site to contact every search engine to opt-in, when every site can simply say "welcome" or "go away" by using the appropriate robots.txt.
This is similar to trespass laws in some states where you can travel on unfarmed unfenced and unposted property - even "private property" - if the land owner wants to prohibit public access they must farm, fence, or post the property.
You can protect your site using passwords, and by using robots.txt. If you don't protect it, then it's open for anyone (person or machine) to visit. If you don't tell machines (robots, spiders) to stay out, they will come in, they will cache your content, they will index it, they will return it in searches.
Smugmug gives users control over the robots.txt that is written for their particular pages on Smugmug - see the previous posts by Andy on the options.
JC Dill - Equine Photographer, San Francisco & San Jose http://portfolio.jcdill.com "Chance favors the prepared mind." ~ Ansel Adams "Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." ~ Terry Pratchett
I found bunches of my photos as well and discovered they are all from galleries linked to social networking sites: myspace, facebook, etc.. I have lots of friends linking to my pix on their myspace pages in particular. Just thought this was interesting... perhaps that's where they're finding our stuff and it makes sense since this is the most active business market on the web.
I'm in the 'don't mind at all camp' myself and glad the images all link back to my site. I've gotten a lot of business from these type of referals and consider all the keyworded & searchable stuff on my site fair game in light of the 'fair use' rulings that others have cited.
Elwood: It's 106 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses. Jake: Hit it.
Comments
After going through the 1,000, it looks like about half are watermarked; the first 75 or so look to have been 'chopped' so the watermark doesn't show up but the rest that show up without watermark were either mined (initially I didn't watermark the thumbs but decided to do so) or they obtained them some other way. There are also a number of repeated shots showing watermarked versions (for a brief time I put the watermark dead center but didn't like it aesthetically so put the watermark on the bottom of the image) and un-watermarked versions of the same image.
I did not see any images from my private galleries. Like Andy stated a few pages back, I do find the discussion very interesting.
And, while appreciating the exposure, I will have to think about any potential liabilities (wasn't there a case recently where a company used an image on Flickr or some other photo site that was posted with a Creative Commons license but the subjects of the image hadn't agreed to that and/or signed release forms? And then they sued someone/everyone involved?).
I think for now I will watermark and right-click protect my oh-so-valuable photos of the Inaugural Charity Chili Cook-off that we held this summer at my day job (Hi-Time Wine Cellars... hitimewine.net - we raised about $10,000 for the local Boys & Girls Club)
Sam, there may be no legal justification. But I'm not sure there is any legal recourse here either unless they actually refuse to remove your pics after you have given them notice. I think this is all covered by the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). I suppose you could sue them, but you would need to demonstrate that you have actually suffered some damage as a result of their infringement. I looked at the page source of a search that returned my pics, and they are not hot-linking to my thumbs--they have their own copies stored somewhere. So they are not stealing my bandwidth (unlike some other sites that do). Warning: I am not a lawyer, so don't pay much attention to me.
Have you requested/demanded that they remove links to your site?
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I am not a lawyer, but from my understanding of the need for model releases you would not be liable for the use by another party of an unreleased image, unless you had made a false claim as the released status of that image. According to Dan Heller's very thorough discussion of model releases at http://www.danheller.com/model-release it is the "user" of a photograph that is responsible for verifying that all necesary releases have been obtained.
Normally the photographer obtains a release because it would often times be almost impossible for the user wanting to use that photograph to track down and obtain the release. Therefore without the release the photograph is less commercially valuable and therefore less like to make the photographer money, so it make sense for the photographer to obtain the release.
Where you can get yourself into trouble is if you make some claim that the photograph is released. For example may stock websites allow you to flag images as commercial or editorial when you upload them, and state that any image that is flagged as commercial needs to have all the apropriate releases. The stock company makes the claim to all of the users of the site that any commercial image is fully released. If you were to flag an image as commercial that did not have the appropriate releases and the purchaser were to be sued they could go after the stock company, and the stock company after you for making false claims about the released status of the images.
While it could be argued that photography.com is using something of yours to make money, I think they would argue that it is the quality of their search results that drives people to their site and makes them money, not the individual images belonging to any one photographer. Google provides a search service for web pages that includes an excerpt of a web page, and photography.com provides a search service for photographs that includes a thumbnail of the image. The vast majority of people don't take issue with google indexing and even caching their web pages, or posts they make on online forums, both of which are copyrighted, even if no explicit claim of copyright is made. Google makes money by providing search results for web pages (and now images too). If we replace web page with photograph and google with photography.com we have the situation we are currently discussing, and I have a hard time seeing how legally or morally this situation is any different than that of google and web pages. For that matter if you had discovered that images.google.com had pictures of yours (which as Andy pointed out earlier in the thread they do) would you be upset about google having these images? Photography.com just seems to do a better job of finding the images than images.google.com.
With regard to halting this on the net, unless you are using some generally accepted way to prevent your images from being indexed (robots meta tags for example) then according to U.S. law (which considering the images are being hosted in the U.S. probably has primary although I don't know for sure) you don't really have a legal leg to stand on regarding halting their display, based on the link that Mike Lane posted earlier (http://stinet.dtic.mil/oai/oai?&verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA471337). Now if photography.com is indexing images that they shouldn't be - and keep in mind private galleries on smugmug aren't really protected, all the private setting does is keep it from showing up on your homepage there are still lots of ways for search engine to come across it (for example tracking back through a link here on dgrin to an image in a private gallery), protected in my opinion means passworded or blocked off by SmugIslands - then you might have a legal leg to stand on.
As Andy has pointed out, some of the posters are usings keywords on the images. So I would suggest if you want to lower your search profile AND not put all your images into SmugIslands or Private Galleries, don't use keywords, which are specifically used to index any data element, not just pictures. Strip all keywords out if the meta data on the image, and use non-descript titles on your images: image_001 or BS001, not "Blue Ship on Horizon with Setting Orange Sun in Thailand".
Hope that helps!
-Fleetwood Mac
I disagree!
But lets look at this from my view point.
Andy, and his crowd are happy as live turkeys the day after Thanksgiving. Gus and the gang are mighty peeved.
Why don't we rule in favor of individual rights? It's your image, you decide if you want these companies to display your images or not.
The Happy turkey's can give their approval, and the peeved ones don't.
OK the companies that want to benefit, and earn money from the use of these images will need to do some additional work, but hey, they are the ones making money off this.
Everybody gets what they want, and the individual's rights are maintained.
Yes, yes, I know............way to simple.
Sam
I just found this thread... Decided to check.. Sure enough, both my last name and my website name brings a lot of my SM-stored images.
To their merit, though, they all lead to *my* actual webpages, so it's not like they are selling on my behalf, at this point I'm leaning to view it as an extra exposure...
The distinction as I see it is that if you used a "generally accepted" method to request that your site not be indexed than the indexer should be obligated to attempt to abide by that. In the footnotes of the Kelly v. Arriba decision (http://pub.bna.com/ptcj/99-560.htm) robots.txt is mentioned, however no legal judgement is made regarding Arriba's obligation to abide by it, as the photographer never made use of it.
There is actually a fairly reasoned paper on the benefits and costs of opt-out with respect to the online world at http://law.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5034&context=expresso. What it comes down to in my opinion is that there is no legal distinction and in my opinion there should be no legal distinction between a phtotograph and a webpage, both are a copyrighted item. In that case what you advocated could be restated "OK the companies *such as google* that want to benefit, and earn money from the use of these *webpages* will need to do some additional work, but hey, they are the ones making money off this." (*my rewording*) In other words google would have to contact the owner of every web page that it wants to include in its search results and request their permission. If that were the case google would be just about worthless, as there is no reasonable way to get the majority of website owners to opt-in to being indexed. The case of website indexing, including imaging, is one in my opinion where the benefits, both economic and social, of requiring an affirmative act in order to opt-out outweigh the costs to the individuals.
the mere fact that you create and post things to the web renders your stuff everyone's stuff. sure there are steps one can take to protect aspects of your rights but by and large you take a calculated risk with your participation on the internet.
thankfully smugmug has provided several ways to enhance security settings. take a gander over at flickr and see how many people there complain about stolen images; real images, not just thumbnails.
if you don't want search engines, any search engine, finding your stuff then just eliminate any keywords from your site. this web belongs to everyone and keywords are the oil that lubricates the engine. you use keywords, you are putting the word out to anyone "come find me". period the end.
you can not play in everyone's sandbox and change the rules. stop using keywords - make galleries private - stop anyone from finding you, unless you give them a map.
Moderator of: Location, Location, Location , Mind Your Own Business & Other Cool Shots
Angelo,
I agree heartily with everything you say, with one exception. If you really don't want the search engines to find you I think you are better off setting your albums to Hello World! -> No. A private gallery that a search engine stumbles across (maybe because you post a link to the gallery in a discussion on dgrin) will still be indexed, however a public gallery with Hello World! set to No should not be indexed if the search engine is behaving properly. From a quick test I did it appears that setting Hello World to No causes smugmug to include the robots meta information that requests that search engines not index a pag in the HTML header...
Very true, Angelo, very true.
I guess my only grudge with them would be that they do not position themselves as a search engine, but as a hosting site/stock photo agency.
At least that was my impression when I first saw the site, I could be wrong.
With that assumption, finding one's images presented in a way as if they are part of the site's portfolio (i.e. surrounded by the site's own paraphernalia) can be discouraging... Especially taking into account that all those aforementioned images come as a result of a "stock photo search", which kinda implies all these pictures are stock images from this site...
Imagine the following situation: I dedicate a portion of my site to the Landscape photography and on the front page of that portion I will put Marc's images thumbnails. Next I create Wildlife section and put Harry's thumbnails all over there. Macro section will be using Brian's thumbs, Portraits will get a bunch of thumbs from Yuri and Wedding section - some thumbnails of Shay's.
All those thumbnails would lead to the respective owner's sites, and I will not be selling them myself.
Would they, however, play an advertisement/luring role to engage people to go deeper to *my* site and explore more, or maybe simply make their decision right then and there an call *my* number, conveniently located right next to those "borrowed" thumbnail images?
And how long, counting in minutes, do you think I'll be still a member of smugmug/dgrin community if I did something like this and this fact became public?
I was making generic references and not alluding to specific smugmug steps
Moderator of: Location, Location, Location , Mind Your Own Business & Other Cool Shots
I didn't really see it that way; if you look on their home page they clearly distinguish between member photos and stock photos, and they also provide articles on topics related to photography and product reviews. They are really a little bit of everything related to photography.
When you go to the stock photos page, it states "The Photography.com search engine allows users to access millions of photographs from multiple online photographic resources. A single photo search query allows up-to-the-minute photo retrieval from independent resources and companies from the BBC to the New York Times." Also the box in the lower right mentions "featured" sources such as Fotolia and iStockphoto.
I don't find any of that misleading.
My Photos
My Blog
On Google+
On DrivingLine
Nik it'd be like you scouring not just Marc's, Yuri's, et al sites and putting their thumbs on your site proclaiming to be in the stock photo business. It'd be like you proclaiming clearly on your homepage that you're a great place to find stock photography from lots of different sources and then going out and scouring the web for thousands or millions of different photographs from many, many different sources and then providing a means of displaying, searching, and linking them from your site.
There is a big difference between what photography.com does and your analogy.
http://photos.mikelanestudios.com/
"Kill a few and they call you a murderer; kill millions and they call you a conquerer".
Or, in this case, "steal a few pictures and they call you a thief; steal millions and they call you photography.com".
Steal billions and they call you Google?
I'm usually sensitive to corporate misbehavior, but I just don't see that these guys are stealing anything. Neither is Google.
And in any case, their activities have been ruled to be fair use by the courts. So the point is moot.
http://photos.mikelanestudios.com/
The HTML spec allows any website to tell certain visitors (robots, spiders, etc.) to stay out - using robots.txt. Courts have ruled that if a search engine follows the rules a site owner sets down in robots.txt, then it is allowed to search (and cache, index, etc.) all sites that don't prohibit this action by using robots.txt. The reasoning is that it is impractical for every site to contact every search engine to opt-in, when every site can simply say "welcome" or "go away" by using the appropriate robots.txt.
This is similar to trespass laws in some states where you can travel on unfarmed unfenced and unposted property - even "private property" - if the land owner wants to prohibit public access they must farm, fence, or post the property.
You can protect your site using passwords, and by using robots.txt. If you don't protect it, then it's open for anyone (person or machine) to visit. If you don't tell machines (robots, spiders) to stay out, they will come in, they will cache your content, they will index it, they will return it in searches.
Smugmug gives users control over the robots.txt that is written for their particular pages on Smugmug - see the previous posts by Andy on the options.
So it's all in your hands.
Learn more HERE and here
jc
"Chance favors the prepared mind." ~ Ansel Adams
"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." ~ Terry Pratchett
I found bunches of my photos as well and discovered they are all from galleries linked to social networking sites: myspace, facebook, etc.. I have lots of friends linking to my pix on their myspace pages in particular. Just thought this was interesting... perhaps that's where they're finding our stuff and it makes sense since this is the most active business market on the web.
I'm in the 'don't mind at all camp' myself and glad the images all link back to my site. I've gotten a lot of business from these type of referals and consider all the keyworded & searchable stuff on my site fair game in light of the 'fair use' rulings that others have cited.
Jake: Hit it.
http://www.sissonphotography.com
www.flickr.com/photos/sissonphotography
http://sissonphotography.blogspot.com/
Thanks,
Scott
Scan Cafe: let the pros do it