Grand Theft Photo

When Robert Burch discovered that an online travel agency was ripping off four photos he'd shot in Ghana, he didn't just get mad. He got a court order. Last summer, a federal judge in New York awarded the Quebec-based photographer $64,866 for the unauthorized use of his copyrighted images. Collecting that money, though, may be impossible. And don't even get Burch started on the 535 websites (his latest count, as of late November) that have used his images without permission.

Since capturing virtually any digital picture is just a right-click and Save-As away, the web has become a free-take zone. Whole collections of pictures on Flickr.com have been copied and sold by out-and-out thieves. And stock agencies are taking strong measures to convert infringers into paying customers or face a judge.

For example, several stock agencies have hired a company named PicScout to use its advanced image recognition software to trawl the web for matches of copyrighted photos. The company estimates that nine out of every ten uses of copyrighted images are unauthorized.

Victor Perlman, general counsel of the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), says, "Photographs are potentially extremely valuable, and you may not even know it at the time."

How valuable? A study last fall by the stock photo industry estimated $67 million lost in a year's worth of infringements just on Getty Images' million or so rights-managed pictures.

Once a photo is posted somewhere by somebody who doesn't own it, the image often ends up on dozens of other websites across a span of industries from real estate to travel. Many have become part of web design templates that keep echoing through cyberspace. The legal argument that widespread stealing amounts to de facto public domaining has become a common tactic in defense of inadvertent infringements.

Ounce of Protection

All your pictures receive copyright protection the moment you snap them. In theory, at least, you're entitled to actual damages, punitive damages, and the profits from the unauthorized use of the picture.

But if you don't officially register your photos or film clips with the U.S. Copyright Office and they're used without your permission, good luck finding a lawyer to take your case. Neither can you collect statutory damages (up to $150,000 per infringement, though judges often knock off a zero). For real protection, registration is the only route.

Even amateurs should do it. "You have the responsibility to register your work," urges Seth Resnick, past president of the Editorial Photographers association. "If you don't, it makes it harder for those who do to enforce their copyrights. It's easy to copy photos from the web, the thieves know that 95 percent aren't registered, and there's little done if they're caught. With so many not registering, it shrinks the risk/reward ratio for stealing."

Not that a copyright actually stops unauthorized use. Robert Burch claims his twilight picture of a Ghanaian monument (on the next spread) has been infringed more than 100 times since 1998. "I can't sell that picture now -- its value has been destroyed," he says. "In 10 years I've spent $25,000 to $30,000 trying to protect my pictures, and I've recovered maybe $14,000 or $15,000."

He received death threats after winning his case against the online travel website, and he expects the only way he'll ever see a dime of the $64,866 he was awarded is through property seizures from the defendant.

Burch tries to do everything by the book, but it doesn't always work out. His contract with a group of Ghanaian musicians promised them half of any payments from selling the photos. So when they see their faces everywhere and ask for their money, he has to tell them the images were stolen. "I look like a liar," he says.

Burch's website, burchcom.com, is encrypted now by WebCrypt Pro. And he routinely hunts for picture thieves by using image-recognition software from Idée Inc., tracking the ISP addresses of frequent visitors to his website, and performing Google image searches on subjects he's photographed.

Think embedding a watermark or circle-C into your pictures will prevent them from being stolen? Burch stopped doing that because it wasn't even a speed bump to the thieves. "All they do is convert the JPEG to TIFF, then back to JPEG -- it removes the encrypted digitial watermark," he explains.

Lara Jade Coton, a British teenager, had her innocent-looking self-portrait stolen off the deviantART website and slapped onto an X-rated DVD by a porn dealer in Houston, TX. She had a prominent copyright symbol imbedded on the image.

The porn movie's owner and distributor, Bob Burge, insists that there was no such symbol on the picture when his designer downloaded it from a deviantART gallery. "And I can show you 30 other websites where that picture's posted," he told us.

Coton's copyright wasn't registered in the U.S., and her face is obscured so you can't identify her. Still, she found an attorney in Florida to file suit in federal court for copyright infringement, civil conspiracy, misappropriation of her image, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The case was pending at press time.