I am not a lawyer. But, I am an author, have several technical manuals,
and have copyrighted info on the web. The following is based on what my
lawyer has told me in the course of three serious copyright battles - two
about taking web based stuff, and one against a person who OCR'd one of my
manuals and put large parts on the web.
If you wrote "Copyright etc.." on your pic, or below your pic, then it is
copyright and they do not have permission to use it. The copyright law
has recently been changed so that you don't have to write "Copyright",
but then it must be shown that you published it in a fashion commensurate
with a reasonable expectation of retaining copyright. Putting it on the
web without the word "Copyright" probably doesn't meet that standard. So
now the question is, "how much justice can you afford?". You can ask
them to remove it, you can insist that they remove it, you can try to sue
their butts off, or you can go "out of the box".
Most of the time they will respond to a simple request to remove it. If
they don't, you can write to their ISP, and point out that their subscriber
is violating copyright, and that if they do not take appropriate action
that they will become accesories to the violation and thus can be named in
any subsequent legal action. That generally gets their attention, since
modern US law works on the "deep pockets" theory. ISP's often have deep
enough pockets to make a suit worthwhile, and so ISP's are worried about
junkyard-dog lawyers. Generally you want to avoid going to "lawyers at
dawn", because you pay a lot of money up front without any assurance it
will come back.
Hoiwever, perhaps you should think outside of that box... first of all, if
they are using an image of an MGB they might be selling something you like.
So, send them a bill for $250 for use of photo, and tell them that you
would waive your normal photo-fee for one of their widgets (assuming they
are selling widgets that cost less than $250). Who knows, they may send
you a widget in the mail. Note, there is a subtle trap in this... if
they don't deny your ownership of the photo in the first response, then
they have admitted that it is your photo and helpd lay groundwork for
future claims! *hee hee hee* If you don't like their widgets, maybe you
should settle for acknowledgement and a link.
Finally, there are a pair of tricks you can perform to really nail down
ownership of your photos. 1) You can open the photo with a program such
as Adobe Photoshop, and put a distinctive bitstring along an edge. For
example, you can use a grey/darker grey combo to spell out "Copyright 1998
Your Name Here" in morse code. Most people will never notice the little
string, or if they do, they will assume that it is just some edge effect.
Of course, it is possible that they will trim it off. 2) The other
possibility is to use a bit editor (such as resedit in Mac land), and go
in and actually change a few bits. I know that "Copyright 199X Thomas I
Perigrin" requires 32 Bytes, so I randomly chose three 32 byte blocks, and
replace them with that string. Then I save the photo under a different
name, and check it with Netscape before quitting. Generally I can never
even find the little bit of noise I have added to the photo. Thats not
surprising since a typical photo can be 100,000 bytes, so I am changing
something on the order of 0.1% of the data.
---
I used to say the only constants in my life were stress, my loving wife,
and the weekly hairball the cat leaves on the carpet. After some medical
problems I am trying to reduce the stress... Other than that little has
changed - my wife still loves me, and the cat still vomits up an offering
every week. A man needs some tradition in his life!
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