Wednesday 8 June 2011

Has your photograph been stolen for use in a competition?

The majority of competitions that require the use of a photograph have in the terms and conditions "Each entrant confirms that the photograph is its own work"

Well today i entered the Birdseye competition which has the above statement in its terms. The competition involves you having to make a recipe with their product and photographing it and uploading it to the facebook page.  After uploading i realised a fair few of the photographs on the page are actually just pulled off the net. The reason i realised this was i had actually seen the recipe and photograph previously of one of the meals when browsing for ideas of things to make. The recipe it's uploaded for is Spicy Chicken Fajitas which you can see here. You need to click on Tasty Ideas for Dinner The photograph is also found here > Click continue to your destination to see recipe and photograph 
The meal is actually Chicken and Kiwi Taco's.
On the entry it says "me my girlfriend and my mate the camra specialist"  P.s. the spelling mistake in the quoted section is not mine.

I would say that this same person obviously has a fair few entries in this competition as i found several entries had just been "lifted" off of the net.

It really peeves me. For two reasons. 1) There are many (yes including me) who actually make the effort to enter correctly with their own work. 2) If someone had "lifted" one of my photographs for use in a competition and was passing it off as their own work i would be livid.

I really hope promoters of competitions actually realise that there are people about who would be more than prepared to cheat to get whatever prize is up for grabs at the time. Though going on some promotions i have seen it seems some companies are sometimes blind to the fact.

Although this doesn't spot and catch all the cheats the reverse image search TinEye can usually help some photographers find out if their images are being used elsewhere without permission.Tineye

5 comments:

  1. Bloody lazy shits! I hope you can report them. It's not fair to people like you who do everything by the book.

    Someone lifted a whole album of photos of mine off Facebook once. It was from a burlesque event I took photos of and the co-organiser decided rather than asking me if she could be supplied with the photos, copied and pasted the whole lot, which must've taken hours, then posted them on her page. The compression on Facebook from uploaded photos copied then re-uploaded made the ones she posted look God-awful and pixellated. Hence I don't take pictures of people any more, they often take the piss.

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  2. I did post on their wall but thought that might be held against me so deleted it and i have emailed with the links to all the original photographs. Though they may hold that against me too. I think complaining often leaves people, in this case me in a bad light even though i haven't done anything wrong apart from highlight it.

    I find that awful that the co-organiser never asked your permission and just nicked your photographs. People stupidly assume because it's the net they can get away with stealing other peoples photographs or creative efforts and they won't get caught.

    It does upset me a bit, i thought i made quite a good effort with presentation and photographing it and to be fair there are some other good genuine entries there too. Cheats just spoil it for everyone.

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  3. Well I hope you get somewhere with your entry, and the cheats get booted.

    The thing to make that situation even worse was she added me as a friend just so she could do it! What a cow.

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  4. Well Birdseye removed the stolen entries (nice to see!), but they also removed one of mine. In my mind the best one i had entered and i had no reason for it's removal so now it's pretty obvious i will get nowhere. Shame but there you are, i still enjoyed taking part. At least cheats won't win and hopefully whoever does win will be someone who put in the effort themselves.

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  5. I think you did the right thing despite there being an unnecessary penalty.

    It's happened to me too, not quite the same way but I had purchased an image from Fotolia and used it for a blog article. Within less than an hour of publishing my blog one of my connections on Twitter had stolen it and used it on hers. Grrrrr arrrrrgh!

    So I then turned to writing a blog about copyright theft so that she got the message!
    Http://vainwales.com Search for 'copyright or creative commons'.

    BTW thanks for today's recommendation on Twitter.

    GowerBizAngel

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