A wedding photographer who's blog I have followed for a while, Neil van Niekerk, had large sections of his site stolen with the images intact and used by a female 'wedding' photographer a while back. She was using the images, accompanying text and even the layout. When confronted she said her 'web designer' did it and the images were in the public domain so she had every right to use them. So he told her to remove them or lawyers would be called.
So she pulls them and then joins a web design forum and starts up this whole 'a big bad male photographer is being mean to me and I'm a poor little girl routine'. Tells everyone that she had no knowledge of the images and it was a big misunderstanding, that her web designer had used stuff off the web as 'place holders' to get the layout right and the website wasn't published. Well apart from that being untrue, how did he find it on google and then screen capture the whole sorry state of affairs. She had another photographers images and words on there as well and there was even a spelling error which was present in the original. The water marks had been cropped off the images I believe. Anyway, hundreds of forum users believe her side of the story and start sending hate mail and threats to the photographer. He can see where all the people coming to bomb him on his site are coming from so he joins the forum and posts her email responses to his request to remove them and screen grabs of the stuff she stole, and even the google search that turned up his work on her site showing the site was live.
Too late, these people were in a blind rage and flamed him for daring to join the forum just to go after this poor little girl, even though she joined and made her first post on that forum accusing him of harassing her a couple of days earlier.
And people wonder why photographers get ticked off when people use their images without permission :bang:
