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Photographer Threatened With Legal Action After Asserting His Copyright

Posted by Soulskill on from the picture-of-surprise dept.

New submitter JamieKitson writes "Photographer Jay Lee got more than he bargained for after sending some DMCA takedown notifications out to hosts of sites using one of his pictures. One Candice Shwagger accused him of everything from conspiracy over local sheriff elections to child abuse. Since Candice is now threatening legal action, Jay has said he'll take down the post, so here's a snap shot. After reading the story, I checked for use of my own pictures and found one of them being used on a review site without even a credit."

6 of 667 comments (clear)

  1. How by tsa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How do I find out who uses my pictures on the internet?

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    -- Cheers!

    1. Re:How by Tastecicles · · Score: 4, Interesting

      one word: Digimarc.

      Or some other form of steg/watermarking.

      Most people who steal images do not even bother to look for watermarks. Ask then answer: how many images are floating the internet? Billions. They start off complacent that their nefarious deeds go unnoticed.

      Funny story (yeah, I bet you hear this all the time): I had a photo of me relaxing on my lowrider a few years ago, uploaded it to a social networking site that shall remain nameless, then a year later I found it on a custom bike blog. After contacting the webmaster, she actually wrote back apologising, I just replied "Hey, don't worry, I thought I'd lost the pic after F***B*** had shitcanned my account, I'm glad somebody found use for it."

      It's still up. Yep, that's me, the ugly one.

      --
      Operation Guillotine is in effect.
    2. Re:How by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Local Guthrie supporters know of her and the site, and are not happy about it. I just sent her this anonymously myself:

      As a local Guthrie supporter, I'd appreciate it if you'd refrain from posting wild conspiracy theories on your blog, as your blog can be found when looking for information on Louis Guthrie. I understand you feel hurt, but you do not come off as the victim in your posts, you come off as an unreasonable copyright offender desperately trying to use your own bad situation to paint our opposition in a bad light. As much as I dislike Garcia, I do not believe in spreading lies across the internet about anyone. You are a fool for doing so. Beyond that, your story has been covered on a very popular news site (http://www.slashdot.org/) and has effectively provided more negative publicity (worldwide) than your little blog could possibly make up for. I'll stop short of attacking you for the initial infringement, although I do believe content thieves (such as yourself) are a drain on society and need to be dealt with. I'm sending this email anonymously so as to not be subjected to your attacks, I am no more of a baby-hating conspirator than Jay Lee.

      And I do firmly believe that she's doing more damage than she understands by attacking a man who is not only innocent, but a victim of her actions.

      Captcha: Leftist

    3. Re:How by cpu6502 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Excellent.
      Downbelow someone posted:
      >>>Treasure hunt! Try to find another photo she has that is infringing and get the owner of the copyright to submit another DMCA takedown!

      I like it. :-)
      They already caught her using the Photographer's photo illegally on facebook. It appears, even after being notified the photo was copyrighted and not for free use, she kept using it anyway on her facebook page (right up to a few hours ago).

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      My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
    4. Re:How by smellsofbikes · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You can drag and drop an image from your desktop onto the Google image search. I was amazed at how fast and accurate it is. It looks like it doesn't even need to be an exact match.

      I searched for a photo of a piece of graffiti from a wall outside of San Francisco and Google found a few other people that had taken a photo of the same wall.

      It doesn't even have to be particularly close. There's a picture of me riding my bike up a cliff, that has been on my webpage since like 1996. The other day, a friend at work uploaded an avatar image for our bike racing team that was my old picture, which I thought was amazing. I asked him how he'd found it and he had no idea it was me: he'd found it on some Cuban website of amazing bike pictures. It's cropped, resized, and left-to-right reversed, but Google Images recognizes them as the same picture. They're doing some pretty sophisticated image processing stuff. Some friends have been playing with this on G+, seeing how long porn pictures last before getting caught/filtered/blocked, and seeing how long it takes for processed pictures to get caught/blocked. It's sometimes possible to get a picture that's cropped back to just the face of the person blocked if it's a large part of the original picture.

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      Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
  2. Candice Shwagger has more problems now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Candice Shwagger now that her antics have made the front page of /.

    Its well knows that the weenies on /. have issues with cyberbullies, and a very long memory.

    Its a good thing that nobody here would print that page to PDF and keep it archived and continue to remind the world of her shennigannis for a very long time.

    I think Houston's best marketing attorny is going to be having problems since future clients will call her site into question because she's pladgerizing other peoples work. The Texas Bar association should really know about this, perhaps they will take action and actually end her career.