Stealing – still not sexy! More on copyright infringement
by Ruby | Jun 12, 2014 | News | 3 comments
Following on from last night’s post about the illegal use of my images I thought I’d share with you the email exchange that I had with the culprit.
What pisses me off here is the sheer brass balls of the denial along with the rudeness of it. I couldn’t give a toss if she’s heard of me or not, there are a lot of people writing erotica and sex, what annoys me is the lie that she created the overall image from stock photography and that she’d put the black borders on it. If you have a look at the infographic I posted yesterday it is easy enough to see that she just cropped out my name on the top of the image and squeezed in her copy below it – and she couldn’t even be bothered to match the font (Josefin Slab if you’re wondering)
So here you go, the denial and my, response.
Response to my request via comments that she take down the image>
I think you are referring to the picture that says BDSM IS My Normal. I actually found the picture of the woman with her hands tied behind her back on a royalty free site using msn search. I put the picture together with the wording on a black background. Now, as far as copyrights. I checked Google image search, along with a few other search engines and found no references to there being any violations. The cover on your book is the same picture of the woman’s body, but that is all. I have never actually even heard of you, nor read your books.
There are no violations as the picture has been altered tremendously and that constitutes a new work of art, as stated in the universal copyright code laws.But, if you can prove the image is yours, that you indeed made it, I shall remove it from my blog post.
Here is the original image on my website from 2011. eroticnotebook.co.uk/bdsm/normal-erotic-ebook-release/If you did find the image on a royalty free site it would have been the book cover with my name on it, as I’ve never released the original image, only the book cover. You didn’t add the black background, you cropped my image and added additional copy to it along with your name and URL. You didn’t even bother to change the file name before you loaded it to your site.And so you know, a royalty free image isn’t the same as a copyright free image. The first means you don’t have to pay for it but it will still be the intellectual property of the creator the second means you can use it without credit.Please remove my image from your website, please also remove it from your Pinterest board.
For anyone that is confused as this lady is about what does and doesn’t constitute copyright and intellectual property violations it is pretty straightforward.
The creator of a piece of intellectual property such as a written work, an image or similar holds the copyright on it from the moment it is created. Before computers writers were told to post a copy of their manuscript to themselves and keep it unopened to prove that they’d written it (the idea being the post mark and date would show a time stamp).
As soon as you create something, you hold the copyright. If you put it on line, you hold the copyright. You hold the copyright until you decide to give it away or sell it.
Yes, yes I do realise that putting our content on line does make it easy for people to use it without our consent, yes I do realise that lots of people don’t know they are doing something wrong because they either don’t know about copyright or they misunderstand it. But the fact remains, what I put up in this space belongs to me until such time I grant anyone else the permission to use it.
If you want to use my work, be nice and ask. I might say no, I might say yes, but if you steal it I will will act to protect myself and my intellectual property.
Thanks for reading,
Ruby x
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3 Comments
Well done you… As a photographer I find that people are fair more casual about ‘stealing’ images than they are stealing words. Despite all my images being watermarked and clear copyright statements all over my blogs people still seem think it is fine to take my images, cut out my copyright and post them with no link to me whatsoever. That, at the end of the day, is thief and when you confront them about it they nearly always shot back with the, it was on the internet so it is free, nonsense.
I have been meaning to write a post about this whole issue for a while because there are many sex blogs which do this, using generic images from Tumblr etc… with absolutely NO credit to the artist whatsoever… which is totally unnecessary when there are so many great artists willing to share their work, who would be delighted you use their image, all you have to do is ASK!
Mollyxxx
ReplyWhat made me laugh in the whole thing was that the shonky image she created from mine has further been corrupted by other bloggers who took her version and then scrubbed out her URL and name so they could use it without crediting where they got it from. Fuckwits!
ReplyWhen I first started publishing, I thought about saving money by browsing for images I could use for free. It just didn’t seem worth it to me in the end, and this is a case that illustrates why purchasing stock images is the best option. They can be found for under $5, and it saves a lot of potential problems. I think I would be absolutely irate if someone used an image of mine and then behaved rudely when I pointed this out to them.
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