Image theft statistics

[Mik37]

Most of you are certainly concerned about image theft on the Web. I'm currently looking for statistics about image theft on the Web. The statistics I'm looking for are mainly regarding images stolen on websites in order to be used without permission on other websites (volume of images stolen...), the estimated loss for images authors, and statistics about methods used in order to steal images: hotlinking, images saved and re-published...

I can find a lot of sad stories about image theft on the Web, but I can't find such statistics.

Does anybody know a website (or other source of info) where I could find such stats?

Many thanks,

[Ash]

Something tells me you might need to compile the statistics yourself.

[jp]

Personally, I find it varies tremendously by image. Some images nobody will ever look at or do anything with. Others, people will find amusing or useful and have fun with them.

Hotlinking is easy to figure out as your webhosting stats can show what's being hotlinked and how much traffic it gets. Most people that do this aren't likely to be the type to actually pay for an image, but it's interesting to see how people use photographs for recreational use.

As far as images saved or copied and reused on the web, I don't think there is accurate information on that. There's no technical way to stop it despite what some people tell you. The only real way is to not put up high enough quality images in the first place, which could also be counterproductive.

[Eric Rose]

I am currently visiting Turkey with two other professional photographers. To our surprise one of their images they shot of a guy in Calgary was being used on a billboard here in Turkey! How they got it is a mystery and they certainly were not compensated for it's use.

[ic-racer]

How can you be a thief when something is given to you for free? I can't view an image on the internet without first downloading it to my personal computer. Are you talking about people hacking into pay-to-view sites?

[QT Luong]

Theft is a meaningless word in this context. What you want to look at copyright infringement, which is unauthorized use of images (viewing and image or downloading it does not constitute a "use" in itself).

Picscout has been conducting studies of infringements on a regular basis. Here's the initial one: http://www.stockartistsalliance.org/...picscout-study

While there is no way to stop that from happening, in the US a letter from a lawyer with the threat of a federal lawsuit and punitive damages of up to $150,000 can cause some thinking.

[Mike Anderson]

This is tangential, but here's a case of extreme unauthorized image reuse:

http://screameverywhere.com/

Also, tineye.com is an interesting site to see how many times a given image has been replicated on the internet.

...Mike

[Scratched Glass]

Screameverywhere - Holy Crap!

[Scratched Glass]

I've stumble across one of my photos that someone has "borrowed", but it linked back to my flickr account, and isn't even really that good, so I don't mind.

[Drew Wiley]

What good are the chicken-scratch images on the web anyway? Just one more reason
to keep the JPEG resolution just good enough to get the idea across, and not good
enough for publication, although in this day and age of the internet and the general
visual mediocrity is has inspired, there are apparently a lot of people who don't know
the difference.