I was wondering if anyone has noticed that one of their Gallery images uploaded to Pixelscrapper has made its way onto other websites? I have a single layout that has been "stolen" by two other websites - one with the name and title, but no mention of Pixelscrapper and the other with no identifying info at all. Is there something that could or should be done? Luckily, it is one I did of the Chicago skyline with no personal information or images. It just disturbs me that the image was "lifted" and appropriated for a click farm website that pays lip service to crafts and scrapbooking. I originally found these by doing a "similar image" search on Pinterest after my layout popped up unexpectedly in my personal Pinterest feed.
#1 Website for Digital Scrapbooking and Hybrid Crafting.
I haven't seen that with mine, but I don't upload many layouts, nor do I have a Pinterest feed. Reverse image searching with Google didn't pull up any extra hits on my layouts.
However, that being said, you can contact the hosting sites and file DMCA takedowns if the person who posted the images won't remove them themselves.
Since the uploaded layouts are not copyright protected, has anyone had any experience with a response on this?
Celestine, assuming you have permission to use the elements in the layout, you do have copyright (at least in the US) just by creating the layout. You don't have to register it or anything.
Five Facts Every Scrapbooker Needs to Know
Thanks, Amanda, for the article link. I did not know that there is an automatic copyright. I will see if I can follow up on this!
Yep.
In the US at least (I don't know for certain for other countries), anything you create is automatically copyrighted to you with no requirement to register. With scrapbooking specifically, as long as you have the rights to use the component parts (which you should if you bought the kit or received it as a freebie) and are using them in the appropriate fashion (not using PU-only items in a commercial project, etc.), then you won't be in violation of copyright yourself, and you do own the copyright to your creation because you created it.
I've had to be up on this information because I end up explaining it a lot to other artists who think you have to register to have a copyright or jump through some silly hoops like mailing printouts to yourself in order to have a date stamp or something.
This happens ... I found a few a couple years back but didn't bother about them .... if you use Google images and drag an image into it you will find any others around the web show up there if it's been stolen ... that's how I found mine ... it's a pain
I did the same thing after the image popped up in my feed. So far they are both still there, even with reporting.
Celestine, have you tried using the information in this link? Pinterest Copyright Violation Reporting
As long as you're the copyright holder (which you are), you should be able to do the full DMCA reporting.
yep - filled out that very form. No action whatsoever. At this point, I'm definitely not going to lose sleep over it.
Well that's just dumb on their part, then. Hopefully they're just slow to respond.