Group Huddle

[Guest]

I like many here, have no problem sharing my drawings, pictures and designs with fellow teardrop enthusiasts.
It has become very apparent that lowlife scumbags are copying our images and gaining a profit for themselves, selling CDs on Ebay to unsuspecting teardrop enthusiasts.
I'm just now begining to get my feet wet per se, with some designs that I could put to good use one day.
My current design in my album, which only has four simple views as of this writting, represent countless hours of my time with many refinement changes, let's just say it would take me a bit of time to count the different files that I haven't deleted.
I would be steaming mad if I saw any of my material from my design or build being sold on Ebay by someone else.
I say lets put our heads together and come up with a way to beat these person(s).
I've got some ideas, but I'm no computer wizard either.
There's got to be a way to stop this without eliminating sharing with fellow enthusiasts!

[DestinDave]

Dean et al... I am an aspiring photographer and have sold several photos and been published a couple of times. I shoot only film so online theft isn't a problem (yet) for me. I have read some interesting articles on protecting copyrighted material in the digital world. Watermarking is the most common method I have heard of but I don't know much about it. I'll re-read some articles and see if I can't provide some input.
One idea I have is to make avatars and posted pics at a relatively small resolution size so that any enlargement would result in a really lousy pic. We could still share higher quality pics with forum members and friends via private e-mails or transfers.

[DestinDave]

Did a Yahoo search of "digital copyright protection" and came up with a lot of useful sites including copyright law, Supreme Court decisions, and software available. Two caught my attention: PhotoMark ($28.00 license) is available at and Protec Photo Album ($49.00 license) from [/img]invisitec.com[img]are%20both%20very%20nice%20packages.%20%20I%20didn't%20find%20any%20free%20shareware%20but%20I'm%20sure%20there%20are%20some%20out%20there.%20%20Protec%20is%20nice%20because%20you%20can%20disable%20mouse%20and%20keyboard%20functions%20(right%20click,%20save%20as,%20copy,%20cut,%20etc)%20-%20all%20any%20browser%20could%20do%20is%20look...[/img]

[DestinDave]

WHOOOOOPS!

http://www.wekasoft.com or http://www.invisitec.com

[BrianB]

You probably don't want to hear this, but if you put it on the internet, it's up for grabs. You can either stress out over someone using your image, or accept that it's going to happen and know that there are worse things going on than someone peddling for a few bucks using one of your pictures. Now, if someone took your schematics and was trying to resell them, that's a different story. But no point in losing hair over a picture of your trailer.

The only effective way I've found to protect against image copying is to use a flash frontend to display the pictures. The benefits are that it'll only work on your server, it pulls images from a non-public directory, and the only way to save your pictures to disk is to do a screenshot, which most people won't either bother doing or not know how. That's really as protected as you can get.

[Gage]

You know there is another problem. We can protect our pictures but what about all the other sites that show pictures taken and posted of gatherings. I for one have hundreds of pics taken at the gatherings that I have been to. I guess I could 'code' each page so you can't right click on the pictures, then add the note "If you would like a picture, please contact me". I had done that once to one of my pages because I had found some of my vintage pictures on another web site promoting a product a few years back. I have sence taken the coding out.

Hmmmmm, what to do, what to do

Have a good day,
Gage
By the way, there are two sellers on ebay doing it, not just one.

[Ross Wade]

You're right BrianB, there are more things worse then an image being stolen. All the SOB had to do was to ask. But SCUM will be SCUM.

Ross

[Charlie Chops 1940]

I spent many years of my other life in contract law and although there is a lot pf protection available for intellectual property it is only as good as the owner is willing to prosecute and pay for the pursuit of damages for infringement. That is a gross generalization but it tends to stand the test of time.

Charlie

[Grant]

"You can either stress out over someone using your image, or accept that it's going to happen and know that there are worse things going on than someone peddling for a few bucks using one of your pictures. Now, if someone took your schematics and was trying to resell them, that's a different story. But no point in losing hair over a picture of your trailer."

No offense meant to you, Brian, but this is just the kind of attitude and thought process that those "scumbags" and others like them are counting on everyone taking. So, let me put it this way:

How many times are you going to allow someone to go out of their way to step on your foot before you do something about it? Or watch someone go out of their way to step on someone else's foot, especially if that "someone else" is a family member? You can carry on with that analogy for quite a while, but my point is that we CAN do something about it, and we SHOULD do something about it, and this community has the power to affect these kinds of things if we choose to act on them. Dean is right, we DO need to work together and at least TRY to address the issue. If we don't, then our inactions as much as condone the piracy and theft and misrepresentations. Sermon done ... almost ...

I have already begun the process of lodging a formal complaint with eBay over the piracy of my photo, and included referances to the illegal use of others' photos. You can do the same thing. This 'board has over 600 members, and even half as many complaints to eBay will certainly net some kind of positive result. We need to follow through with other auction sites that we become aware of, as well.

Go to these eBay auctions, get the sellers' ID & Seller # and record the Item #s of the offending listings. Then go to eBay's complaint dept. - http://pages.ebay.com/help/contact_inli ... oblem.html - and follow the directions to report copyright infringement and/or photo piracy. Keep your comments/message short and to the point, but include the seller's ID & Seller #. Finish by saying something like "This seller is in direct violation of copyright law, indicateing the fraudulent nature of the seller and his/her motives, and does not reflect well on the eBay community as a whole" - in your own words to that affect, of course. The folks at eBay say they'll respond within 24-48 hours - I filed my complaint at 4:30 am PST this morning, so we'll see.

Does this take a little time and committment on your part? Well, yes it does ... if you care about things like this. If you don't, I wouldn't like to think how THAT reflects on OUR family & community ...

CHEERS!

Grant

[BrianB]

You guys are taking years off your lives getting angry over such small things. It's not about someone going out of their way to step on my foot, it's about picking your battles. Let's say you spend an hour writing a letter and sending it off to ebay. If they do get around to cancelling his auctions, or even killing his account, he's not just going to lower his head and skulk away. He'll reregister with a new account, put his auctions right back up, and you'll be right back where you started. If he stole my schematics and was selling them, then I'd jump on the bandwagon. But raising my blood pressure over stealing an image of my (soon to be) trailer just isn't worth my time.

By the way, here's an example of the flash protection I was talking about earlier:
http://www.brianburton.org/imgprotect/imgprotect.html

I didn't add code to scale the image, but you get the point. You pass the filename to it in HTML and it pulls the image from a nonpublic directory. The only way to get the image is to take a screen shot, print it, or decompile the SWF. But there is nothing out there that will stop people completely.

[Guest]

I would really like this thread to stay positive, so as to find amoungst ourselves, what are the best ways to combat this problem.
Maybe someone can help me out and let me know if I've missed any very recent tresspasses against our members;
Denny, Ross and Grant. (Someone posted other pics taken also, but no owner names)
I say let's start by doing a little footwork and filing formal complaints with Ebay as per Grant's instructions.
I'll search out the auctions/sellers noted in our forum and post all the links in one spot.
I think this is a good first step approach. We can build up our defenses over time, but we can go on the offensive Right Now!

[mwatters]

Speaking as someone who's had his work copied and marketed by others (of a different sort), I understand the frustration. But I have to add that there's very little you can do about it that is worth the bother. I honestly don't think you'd feel it worth the bother (and expense) of dealing with the problem legally. That leaves you solely with the tactic of making the bootlegger's problem more difficult. That's a losing game.

I suppose the other tactic is to play spoil-sport and try to put as many of these files up in easily accessable (and free) spaces as possible. Remove the market for the bootleggers by freeing up the info.

mkw

[asianflava]

Let's say you spend an hour writing a letter and sending it off to ebay. If they do get around to cancelling his auctions, or even killing his account, he's not just going to lower his head and skulk away. He'll reregister with a new account, put his auctions right back up, and you'll be right back where you started.

Yeah but if he has to do this all the time, maybe he'll stop or at least not do it as often. His profits (from other's work) will take a big hit. He may find something else to steal and move away from teardrops.

[Frank]

I agree that we need to do what we can, even if it only amount to making it hard on the guy to do busness. I also agree that some of us can write and express our selfs (and spell) better than others. So in that light, Dean has acumulated the specifics, can someone write a letter the rest of us can copy (change the names, emails, etc ) and mail into E-Bay?

[Guest]

Frank,
Regarding that letter;
All I really got to do, was choose questions from a few different categories and then simply list the six item numbers. Their form didn't ask me or let me type in anything else.
Maybe Grant is better versed on how to get to the top with them boys at Ebay?