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Copyright Infringement?

We regularily read the gadget blog Gizmodo, along with EnGadget, Consumerist, and countless others. About two years ago, we wrote about how Consumerist just published a Getty Images photo with the watermark - (Getty Infringement, 2/27/07) which, to me, is a sure sign that you didn't download the image with permission. Now, we find that Gizmodo has taken a generic shot of the Las Vegas Convention Center, as a part of their CES coverage, and co-opted one of Jill Greenberg's crying babies images to make an editorial comment about CES -(Gizmodo's Guide to CES, 1/7/09). Note that the comment isn't about Greenberg, so this is highly likely to be an infringement.

Note that we did a bit of research and couldn't locate a place where Greenburg's crying baby images were being licensed as stock, and they surely are not a part of a subscription model at any stock agency, so Gizmodo would have had to specifically license the image either through Greenberg, or through wherever they might be individually licensed as stock.

Further, it is reasonable to assume that Greenberg would require photo credit, and further, she would require sign-off on a montage of her images with others, and I am not making a major leap here to believe she wouldn't sign off on the above montage.

This would be where a service like TinEye, PicScout, or others would be of great service in locating infringements of your work, or atleast places where your work appears so you can confirm it's authorized, or not. We showed you how TinEye found one of my images within a montage of others last July (TinEye - Oh My!, 7/18/08). Becoming aware of and comfortable with, image search/recognition technologies will be important, and likely something you should do once a day (if you're doing it manually), or set up a solution to search for your images and report all appearances of your images via e-mails.

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