Over the last several days, I found nearly 100 websites using my images without my authorization. Most of these sites were forums, but quite a few were blogging sites, four of which were birding blogs. I am not going to name names at this time, but if I continue to find the rampant thievery of my copyright photographs, I am going to list each and every offender on  this website. 

There is nothing in this world that torques me off more than a thief! When my images are used without my approval (STOLEN), it’s the same as if the perpetrators walked into my home and stole something. You may say “well, that’s a little harsh isn’t it?” Hell no it’s not harsh! I spend valuable time and money (equipment) in each and every photo that I take. I take the time to put my copyright watermark on each and every photo that I will post online. Imagine how you would feel if you found your copyright photo being used on a website, and the site owner claims they took the photo. One of the reasons that people don’t understand the laws about copyright and copying is that they see people just copy photos and text and think it must be okay because everyone else does. But it isn’t okay.

As soon as an individual writes, photographs and/or takes a video, it is protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). If you do not receive written permission from the copyright holder before using a photo it is stealing under the DCMA. It does not matter whether you credit someone after the fact, you have to ask BEFORE you do it. What if I came to your home in the middle of the night and stole your car? Should I expect you to be happy when I returned it the next day and said “that was a nice ride”. 

⇒According to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA): Every photograph is the intellectual property of the person who took the photograph. Copyright protection attaches even where the person has not put a copyright notice and even if the copyright is not registered with the Copyright Office.
⇒Every copyright holder has certain exclusive rights that attach to their work. These include the right to reproduce, distribute, display and create derivative works from the work. Without permission, even if you were to give credit to the copyright holder, you would still be infringing their work.
⇒If you were to contact the photographer and ask for permission to use the photo, you then would not be violating the rights of the photographer provided you abide by whatever terms the two of you agree to. 

To sum this all up; If someone comes to me and says, “Hey John, I really like your pictures. Is it okay if I use one of them on my website?” I will more than likely approve as long as credit it given under the photo, a link back to my site is given, and the photo is not redistributed elsewhere. 

Protecting your images

Red-breasted Merganser | Click thumbnail for larger view | ©2010 John Briggs Photography - All Rights Reserved

The only sure fire way to protect your images is to NOT post them online. You may ask, “what fun is that?” If you do post photos online, crop them small and render in low resolution. 

There are several techniques, plug-ins and software we can use to make website downloads and image theft much harder. Links for how-to’s and plug-ins will be at the end of this post. 

One way to protect images is to add a copyright watermark, such as I have done with the photo above. Clearly state who the photo belongs to when designing your watermark. The best way to do this is to make a brush preset. When an image is ready to receive your copyright watermark, simply select the brush, click the area of the photo where you want it placed and save. 

A copyright statement may also be clearly indicated in text near the image; include the year of copyright, the copyright holder’s name, and your rights management (such as: all rights reserved or a creative commons type license). For those that manage their own web page, a copyright notice deserves a special web page of its own, indicating the copyright and your policy on image downloads, usage, and theft. 

Low resolution images should always be used on the Internet to protect them from theft. A 550 pixel wide image saved at 72 dpi is a good size for Internet use. This will not give down loaders much image to work with other than for Internet use. On a photo sharing site like Flickr, images are re-sized to 500 pixels in their longest dimension for basic viewing, and you can upload images 500 pixels wide and not change how most users view the photo. 

Another way to foil some thieves is to use a right click disable script on your website. I use a plug-in for Word Press called WP-CopyRightPro. This plug-in will disable selection of text, disable right click, protects from iframes, protects from drag and drop images and it doesn’t have problems with search engines. It will protect copying of your content 90% of the time, but is not fool proof. I installed this plug-in yesterday. 

Another problem is bandwidth theft, aka hotlinking. In this process people use images from your server to display in their own web pages. This results in the image still being on your server but linked to and displayed by a remote website. This is easy for people to do and it happens a lot. You may ask why should I prevent this from happening. In short, other websites are stealing your bandwidth. If your web host has a policy on how much bandwidth you may use in a month, you do not want this type of theft happening on your site. When hotlinking occurs you don’t know how the image is being used. The site using your link could be a pornography site or malicious activity could be involved on the site. 

Hotlinking is preventable. Most web hosting services provide a link in their cpanel to turn on hotlinking protection. An alternate way to deal with hotlinking is to use a ‘.htaccess file’. This is a plain text file that allows the user to make configuration changes on an Apache server. If you are comfortable with making changes to an .htaccess file, the following lines of code will prevent hotlinking. 

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mydomainname\.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|gif|bmp|png)$ - [F] 

Replace ‘mydomainname’ with your domain name. Leave everything else in the code intact, including characters such as ? and $. If you want to add other sites that you want to allow hotlinking, such as search engines and forums, add this line of code BEFORE the RewriteRule line in the code above. Be sure to change ‘externalsite.com’ to the site you want to allow.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?externalsite.com [NC] 

When the above code is used, those who try to hotlink will find the ‘Image not found’ marker on their web site. If you want an image to show up when the culprit is trying to hotlink, such as the one illustrated below, replace the RewriteRule line above with this line of code: 

RewriteRule \.(jpg|gif|bmp|png)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/imagename.jpg [NC,R,L] 

Replace the yourdomain with your own domain name and the jpg image name that you want to show up on the offenders site. Here is the image that shows up on sites trying to hotlink to my site: 

Hotlinking image | Click thumbnail for larger view

You may be asking, “How do I find out if my images are being used without my say so?” First of all, you must be able to devote an hour or two each month tracking down image thieves. I use Google and Yahoo image search and search for my images using the name that I gave them, such as bald_eagle.jpg. I also use an SEO tool called Backlink Checker. Simply type in your web site address and the tool will return every site that is linking to yours. It’s up to you to check the sites to see if the link is legitimate or not. If you have access to your server, use cpanel and check your log files. This is by far the best way to check for hotlinking. Another tool is called Copyscape. The free version works well if you have a small site. 

The steps I outlined in protecting your images will not stop everyone. Those who are determined to lift your images will do so with screen capture programs. I use a buddy system as another way to stop image thieves. If I see a friend’s image on another site, I will let them know. This week, I was contacted by 3 followers who found images of mine on other sites, none of which had permission to post the images. If you find my images on another site, please let me know. You may email me or comment on any post on this site. I will keep all reports in confidence.

Here are a few links on how to make a copyright brush:

Creating a Custom Copyright Brush in Photoshop

Creating a Copyright Watermark Brush in Photoshop Elements

Watermarking Photographs with Corel Paint Shop Pro

In closing, you will not stop everyone from stealing your images. Those that are determined and web savy will get an image one way or another. The combination of steps that I have provided to protect your images will make it a hassle and not worth the effort for most image thieves. If you find your image on another web site without your permission, there are steps to take to get the image removed. This an involved process and I will not get into it here, but here is a great article on What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content.

Happy birding!

©2010 Birding in Maine. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Birding Fox Island
2. Wayward January Bird

It has been a while since my last post, but all is well. Thanks for the emails asking about my well-being.

As some of you already know, I have gone back to school. My first semester at SMCC Bath campus started at the beginning of September. My schedule is full as I am taking 5 classes this semester: thus the reason I have been absent from posting to my photo blog. It has been nearly 30 years since I graduated from high school and things have changed. But know that I am having a wonderful time!

For the next two years, I will be going for my Associates degree in Applied Science, Medical Assisting. Graduation is set for May 2011. All is going well at this point with classes in Algebra, English Comp, Psychology, Biology/Lab, and Databases (Access).

I have always been interested in the medical field. Back during the late 80′s, I was an EMT/Firefighter in central Pennsylvania. After being layed off from my last job because of economic conditions, I sought a new beginning. Where do I want to go? Taking inventory of my interests, and with some great help from the folks at the Bath Career Center, I am pursuing a career in the medical field. My options after graduation will be to seek employment and/or expand my study as a Physicians Assistant at UMA. I am undecided at this point which way to go, but with the needs present in the medical field, either option should be a good choice.

I will be posting from time to time. I love photography, and I love sharing my photos with you. I have photos that are still on my CF card from this past Sunday when Sharon and I visited the Fox Islands. I will get the story and photos up sometime this coming weekend.

I may not go out birding as much as I used to, but I still go out when I can. You can be assured that when I do, I will post about it!

Happy birding!

©2010 Birding in Maine. All Rights Reserved.

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I have been participating in several birding related memes for quite sometime. It’s an enjoyable experience and I have made quite a few online friends who have some wonderful blogs. Another aspect of participating is the visitors that memes bring to your blog. I don’t submit my links to raise my “hits”, but since my first meme participation my visitor base has nearly doubled. Not just from Maine, but from all over the world!

The research I have done on the birding related memes has led me to a few conclusions: (not scientific in any sense, but I have been asking questions)

• Most birders only have time to bird on weekends and holidays and post about their outing on Saturday, Sunday or the first one or two days of the week.
• Viewership on this blog and some others that I have surveyed spike between the hours of 6:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.
• From those surveyed, bloggers post most frequently on Saturday and Sunday evenings.

So where am I going with this? It’s simple. If most birders can only get out to bird watch on weekends and or holidays, then why not have a meme for these weekenders? You may already post to several memes. There’s no rule that says you can’t post a link to various memes.

Beginning this Saturday May 9th, 2009, Wildbird Weekend will be launched. Every Saturday, I will put up the Wildbird Weekend post which will always include a Mr. Linky for all the participants’ links. Note: You’ll have until Wednesday to get your link in.  After Wednesday, I close the Linky in order to prevent spam. Please keep the links to posts that are about birding or birding related activities only.

I will host this meme on a trial basis for one month. If after this period of time participation seems to be going well, I will make it permanent. If it’s a disaster, I will take it down for good.

If you get anything out of this, it will be greater visibility for your blog. Leave me a comment if you like this idea and if you may be participating.

Happy birding!

©2010 Birding in Maine. All Rights Reserved.

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Red-breasted Nuthatch | Click for larger view

⇒Fog, rain, drizzle and mist. That has been the norm for the last several days. Forecasters are predicting a very wet weather pattern for the next week. Heavy rain is predicted for Friday night and a slow moving storm may bring flooding rains on Monday and Tuesday. The only possible sunshine I see is on Sunday for part of the day.

Springtime along coastal Maine is a cool and wet season most of the time. Ocean water temperatures are in the upper 30′s and the wind flow off the ocean brings temps in the upper 30′s to low 40′s with fog and low clouds. Inland locations can see temps in the 50′s to low 60′s and bright sunshine.

⇒Several new visitors today. FOY Great Blue Heron flew through the yard and out across the marsh. Another first of the year was a male Northern Harrier who swung through low over the lower yard and landed in a tree. On Tuesday, we had a Snow Goose come out of the cove and into the lower yard with several Canada Geese. Chipping Sparrows began showing up and earlier in the week we had six Fox Sparrows scratching under the feeders for several days.

In the southern parts of Maine, Great and Snowy Egrets, Glossy Ibis, Eastern Bluebird and Eastern Phoebe are beginning to show up. Ross’s Geese were seen near Biddeford Pool and Scarborough Marsh. A Golden Eagle and a Black Turkey Vulture were also seen.

Aerial view of area around our home. Red arrow marks our home. | Click for larger view

⇒A new I and the Bird is up over at Great Auk – or Greatest Auk?. A recent post of mine, “Yard Birds from a Blind” is included in the great line up.

⇒The Freeport Wild Bird Supplyis now open. The previous store, The Wild Bird Center of Yarmouth, was destroyed along with two dozen other businesses in a January 2nd arson fire.

⇒Officials at Acadia National Park have closed hiking trails on and around the Precipice Cliff to protect peregrine falcons that have been showing pre-nesting behaviour.

⇒Maine state biologists are preparing to conduct a census of nesting great blue herons and other wading birds amid signs that their colonies may be declining. Yours truly will be a participating volunteer in monitoring nesting sites in my area of the state.

⇒On numerous occasions this month, low-flying wild turkeys have struck motorists in Maine — one smashing a truck windshield, sending glass flying; the other knocking a man off his motorcycle, causing severe injuries.

⇒From our friends to the north: On Sunday, March 29, 2009, Quebec’s Premier Jean Charest announced the creation of 14 new national parks and additions to another, totaling 4.5 million acres of new protected areas in the province.

This brings Quebec’s total protected areas to just over 8% of the provinces land mass. Just 5 years ago, the total protected areas in Quebec were less than 1% of the province.

⇒I will leave you today with my yard list so far this year. Some of the species listed were not in the yard, but in the cove within 50 yards of the shore at the bottom of my yard. I count them if they fall in this range as a yard bird. All bird listed were seen from our yard or from the windows in our house.

American Black Duck
American Crow
American Goldfinch
American Robin
American Tree Sparrow
American Wigeon
Bald Eagle
Barrow’s Goldeneye
Black-capped Chickadee
Blue Jay
Bohemian Waxwing
Broad-winged Hawk
Brown Creeper
Brown-headed Cowbird
Bufflehead
Canada Goose
Cedar Waxwing
Chipping Sparrow
Common Eider
Common Goldeneye
Common Grackle
Common Loon
Common Merganser
Common Raven
Common Redpoll
Dark-eyed Junco
Double-crested Cormorant
Downy Woodpecker
European Starling
Fish Crow
Fox Sparrow
Golden-crowned Kinglet
Great Blue Heron
Green-winged Teal
Hairy Woodpecker
Hooded Merganser
Horned Grebe
House Finch
Laughing Gull
Long-tailed Duck
Mallard
Mourning Dove
Northern Cardinal
Northern Harrier
Northern Mockingbird
Northern Pintail
Osprey
Pileated Woodpecker
Pine Grosbeak
Pine Siskin
Purple Finch
Red-bellied Woodpecker
Red-breasted Merganser
Red-breasted Nuthatch
Red-tailed Hawk
Red-winged Blackbird
Ring-necked Duck
Snow Bunting
Snow Goose
Song Sparrow
Tufted Titmouse
Turkey Vulture
White-throated Sparrow
White-winged Crossbill
Wild Turkey
Wood Duck

Happy birding!

©2010 Birding in Maine. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Goose Rocks Beach Shorebirds
2. Birding Fox Island

2-23-09 Digging out a must! | Click for a larger view

Unbelievable! Those were my very first words when my wife and I awoke to explosions at 10:30 p.m. Sunday night. Five transformers blew, starting just to our south and finishing with the one across the road from us. The flashes from these explosions lit our room like it was daylight, even though all the blinds and curtains were pulled shut.

A major snowstorm struck Maine Sunday night into early Monday. The storm started as rain Sunday evening, but soon changed to a heavy wet snow. By the time the storm ended at 6:00 a.m. Monday morning, 13″ of very heavy and wet snow had accumulated here at home. Towards the end of the storm, the temps dropped sharply, crusting the snow and making it the consistency of wall plaster. Further inland where the temperatures were much colder than here on the coast, snow totals were upwards of 24″.

I have dealt with more than three times the thirteen inches of snow we received, but this storm had a devastating impact. The snow clung to everything… trees, power lines, signs and homes, even the trunks of trees were plastered with snow due to the high winds driving it sideways. We lost power when the transformers blew, and got power restored late this afternoon. A total of 40 hours without the conveniences that we all take for granted. 140,000 Mainers were without power during and after the storm.

2-23-09 View - West (on the ridge across the road from where we live) Bath, Maine | Click for larger view

Immediately after the power went out, Sharon and I got up and began preparing. I lit the fireplace, she gathered the flashlights and candles. For those of you who have a fireplace, you know how inefficient they are. Suffice to say, I slept very little the last two days, having to feed the fireplace wood every hour and a half to keep us warm and to prevent the pipes from freezing.

Once daylight arrived, I surveyed the damage. Every tree had limbs drooping to the ground and most had broken limbs. The spruces looked beautiful, but damage was widespread. The losers of this event were the birch trees. Most were bent in half with their tops touching the ground.

Birds began showing up at our feeders, but had trouble accessing them. The snow had caked on every feeder, and removing the snow from them was a chore. I had to chip at them with a screw driver to remove enough of the snow to make them usable. Shortly after returning inside, 51 American Goldfinches and 39 Pine Siskins descended on the feeders and had a feast. I am sure they appreciated my efforts.

The sounds of chainsaws and generators filled the air. Navagating on area streets and roads was difficult and dangerous. Schools and businesses were closed. Normally, 13″ of snow does not cause much of a a problem. But with this mess it was like getting a severe ice storm. Rain, then heavy wet snow which froze nearly solid as the colder air worked in. As I write this, 48 hours after the storm began, snow still clings to the trees and power lines and 39,000 Mainers are still without power.

I need some sleep as I am exhausted. I leave with you some photos of the beautiful but devastating storm.

2-23-09 Limbs sagging under the weight of heavy snow | Click for larger view

2-23-09 Backyard view | Click for larger view

2-23-09 View - north from the backyard | Click for larger view

2-23-09 Snow laden branches | Click for larger view

2-24-09 Finally blue skies! | Click for larger view

2-24-09 View from Ft. Popham looking toward Cox Head | Click for larger view

 

Happy birding!

©2010 Birding in Maine. All Rights Reserved.

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