In November 2007, while attending the Red Bull Air Race qualifying in Perth with a friend, I took a a number of photos of some of the many police officers who were in attendance in the crowd. Along with photos of the various Red Bull aeroplanes, I also published a photo of two police officers in my Red Bull photo gallery.

Several weeks ago, I received the following email, which referenced the image of the two police officers:

In my previous post on copyright violations, I described the situation which inspired me to write about this topic:

I could have responded in numerous ways - including taking no action. At the other extreme, I could also have sued, claiming improper use of my copyrighted image.

This blog post was inspired by an issue which recently occurred in my own workplace.

Several months ago, while reading an employee-only internal newsletter published by my employer, I happened to recognise a photo (shown below) that had been used in the headline of the newsletter, and was also used on the company intranet (linking to the newsletter).

That particular photo is available on my website, and is clearly labelled as a copyright image that cannot be used without permission. No-one had requested my permission to use the photo.

the stolen photo - lonely autumn leaf

Matilda Bay, Western Australia
Canon EOS 350D, 17-85mm IS @76mm, 1/125 sec, f/5.6, ISO400

Some digging through my webserver logs indicated that a colleague had found the image while doing a Google image search for images relating to autumn.

I only happened to see the photo in the publication because I'm an employee of the company, and hence have access to this particular newsletter. If the photo had been used in any other company, I wouldn't have noticed!



If you notice that a colleague has "stolen" one of your photos, and is using it without your permission in an internal employee-only publication, what would you do?
Post details on how you would respond using the comments facility below.

I'll be posting details in a future blog post on how this particular issue was handled.


Edit: I've posted a follow-up article here.