Thread: Angry at mob image thieves!!!

Hi,

I am just venting some anger here... someone has stolen images from my mob album and has been selling wigs on ebay using my images!!! (Obviously they are cheap fakes of my wigs as all of mine are made to my own spec ).

Anyway, the only place they could of got the images is from here, as this is the only place where the pictures had the wig style names (which i create) tagged on them, and the cheeky 'image thieves' had used my style names as well as my pictures! The sheer front of it!

I have now removed my albums and am busy watermarking all my pics so i can re-post and i now need to go through my shop and revise all the listings with watermarked images - an extremely gruelling task.

Anyway, a note to all vendors and online sellers - watermark your images! If you don't the same could happen to you and it is so unfair and frustrating as we are the one's that have invested a lot of time, effort and money in creating such lovely pics.

Annabelles wigs/Claire - you be especially careful because they are obviously breaking in to the wig game and you have some lovely pics which you also haven't watermarked. They had approx 20 listings on ebay that were using our images - they've all been removed now, but they also had a few from Fumi and Jennys hairsense.

Has this ever happened to anyone else??

Sammy xxx

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i had my images nicked by news international (for use in the sun newspaper) they settled out of court and gave me full apology, you can get a batch watermarker do it all in one go

No way! That's really bad - you would expect more from a big company like that. At least you got something out of it though, i was shocked enough when i found this vendor using mine, i can't imagine the shock of opening the sun newspaper and seeing them!

Thanks for the tip, i've just googled it and found some free batch editing software which looks like you can do batch water marking really quickly with so i am going to give that a whirl. Hadn't even crossed my mind.

Thats terrible, \i am so sorry to hear that this has happened.

I'm afraid that's the way of the internet - once it's up there someone will steal it. I wonder if it would be possible to move the galleries to Flash applications so the images are harder to steal *muses*

Originally Posted by MissPussyCat

Thats terrible, \i am so sorry to hear that this has happened.

Thanks for the support hun. I was pretty upset when i saw it.

Originally Posted by evildrneil

I'm afraid that's the way of the internet - once it's up there someone will steal it. I wonder if it would be possible to move the galleries to Flash applications so the images are harder to steal *muses*

Way way over my head??? But if it stops things like this then it sounds good to me.

I had several of my images stolen by mens magazines, Nuts and Zoo, for them to put on their funny pictures found on the internet. Took us an age to get them to admit they were copywrite protected. They still steal the images but send you an e-mail now telling you that they are going to steal it. Or occasionally offer some useless free tat in exchange.

It's hard to avoid - as some people don't want to work for their own reward, they just want what someone else has already got; they seem to justify taking others' pics/info/credits simply because they feel that they too deserve your success.

An Australian agency (I can't remember their name) used to advertise a performer named Valerie (or something similar) using a very nice selection of my images.

Similarly other supposed 'agents' have had me falsely listed on their websites as under their representation - even when I gave an ulitmatum to remove, they tried to argue it was some 'right' of theirs to represent me in 'their' own country...

A British agent (since disappeared off to the other side of the globe) advertised my pole dance services, despite my protestations that I've never taken a pole dance class in my life, let alone perform on one!

Various weird sex-chat sites and adverts in magazines have also nicked my images pretending that the girl seen in the pics is just who the clientele will be talking with/engaging for services. We had to go through a 3rd party host and actually prove that I wasn't making false claims before anything would be done. The offending company was so impudent as to actually claim the images were their property.

One web-design company (can you believe it?) actually claimed to have created my website - and had lots of imagery 'borrowed' as screen grabs and posted them up to demonstrate their 'skills'.

I've even appeared on a poster campaign (as seen in a chip shop window!) advertising a music event in Nottingham that I'd never heard of.

Aside from all this, we often get 3rd parties making weird MoB claims:

One claimed that some of our media work was somehow theirs, despite our being in the show, repsonsible for much of it's content and credited etc. Presumably they did this because they had personal invite from me to attend, but they re-wrote this trivial factoid to claim that their 'company' was approached/invited by ITV to do the work... It looks like they have been attempting to trade on this information by posting up images taken at this / show logos.

Various agencies have used images taken at High Tease to advertise 'their performers and events' and also the flippin' text I've personally written for promotion of said performers. Another burlesque production group (also no longer in operation) thought to use an image of me, taken by Tas Kyprianou at High Tease as the basis for an e-flyer campaign for their event.

Just last month, we were sat in The Ivy and told by a perfect stranger that someone she taught make-up skills to is 'MoB's official make up artist and does all our shows'. ???

We've also met our 'top performer' at a really low-end event (and were disappointed to say the least) .

Others don't swipe the pics, they re-create them - but that's another grumble-thread....

I could go on...

Wow Kittie! That is horrendous! It is such a challenge as i only stumbled across this by chance... How do you keep on top of it? Or is it just down to you spotting it by chance?