I try to look at the access log for my snowslider and SwissMountainLeader websites from time to time to get an idea of what traffic I’m getting. I always look at the referrer logs, that’s where visitors arrive on the site using links on other websites, to see how much the sites are being talked about.
A couple of weeks ago I noticed visits from a domain called “livestrong.com”, which I’d never heard of, visiting a page on SwissMountainLeader about the flower butterbur. I was curious so I visited the site and found a very lightweight page with a couple of lines of text about butterbur in the context of a herbal remedy and one of my photographs at the bottom of the page. I was pretty unhappy about that, my photographs are copyright using a Creative Commons license called Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. That’s a standard license and it means, for example, if you want to link to those images on Facebook to show your friends that’s perfectly fine, but if you’re going to use my images for anything that makes you money or is any kind of commercial activity then that’s not allowed. The difference is about whether the reuse of the images is what we call fair use or not.
As Livestrong.com were using my images in a commercial context then it wasn’t fair use and I don’t really want my material to be used to promote herbal remedies. Companies do this from time to time and I send them a note asking them to pay for the use of my images or remove them, it’s exceptionally rare that those companies don’t correct their error and remove the image.
But Livestrong.com made it clear they’d no intention at all of voluntarily removing the images. Their first response was to refer me to their terms and conditions which required me to make a lengthy formal complaint to their copyright agents (demandmedia). I thought this was outrageous, at no time had I accepted their terms and conditions nor could their unauthorised use of my work be deemed as my acceptance of their terms and conditions. Their later response was so very absurd and unreasonable I’ll just reproduce it here :
We pull our photos from Google images. If you do not want to have your photos indexed by Google, please use the link below to remove yourself from the indexing.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35308
As Google, and other search engines make clear, the fact material is indexed by them doesn’t alter copyright and images in particular may be subject to copyright. I note that Livestrong.com are indexed by Google and make copyright statements on their site, statements that are misleading and incorrect as it’s not their content at all.
Many further requests and complaints to them didn’t elicit any response at all. I’ve never personally encountered an attitude like this to image reuse, livestrong.com and demandmedia seem to acknowledge they were using my material but seem confident there’s little I can do about it and seem to view Google Images as being a library for material to build their websites.
In fact, it transpires that livestrong.com support staff aren’t really on the ball and they’re not using Google Images at all. I looked at their webpage and worked out what they’re doing.
For any given search term, for example “butterbur”, they take the top 5 or 10 images from a search using Bing Image Search, not Google, and just embed the thumbnails from Bing with links back to the sites the images were taken from. Those links are labelled as “nofollow” so they’re not rated by search engines to increase your own site authority. This explains why they didn’t just remove the image when I’d asked which had really puzzled me, I’d assumed it was a static page and even though they’d been using my image that there was some amount or research or original work but it turns out to be nothing more than a automated process.
I’d assumed this was originally some sort of oversight but it now transpires that livestrong.com and demandmedia are engaged in the systematic, large-scale reuse of other peoples images using Bing Image search as an image library to build web pages with practically no original content. All you need to do to be a victim of livestrong.com and demandmedia is have work captioned or titled with a search term they’ve targeted and to have your original work rated as being highly relevant by Bing searches and your images will appear on their website with no benefit to you.
I’m surprised Bing allow this, I’m delighted Bing had placed some of my work at the top of their search listing and I like what they’ve done with the search engine a lot, but if Bing is going to be used for automated, large-scale, systematic image theft then it really undermines their brand.
