It’s boring red-eyed work, slow and tedious; taking screen grabs and making notes. Search results lead you off in hundreds of directions so you follow a rapidly expanding and widening path. There are many dead ends and it’s surprisingly difficult to retrace your tracks.

How to find your images

I used mostly the Google and A9 search engines, looking for words likely to be used on pages that had used my drug pictures. I chose this subset of my work because someone who nicks a shot of mine of – for example – heroin is also likely to use that word on the page. That makes finding the infringement much easier for those shots than for most photographs. Other subject matter is going to be a lot harder – who knows what words are likely to be found with a shot of children playing? This means it’s best to concentrate on the most specialist subjects in your collection – named people, specific places, the less common sports – anything where the text is likely to contain predictable words.


A search result from the A9 search engine, showing one of David Hoffman’s photographs being used without permission

In those two evenings I found a dozen sites with my images being used without a licence but that was just the beginning of the work. Each page with my images had to be recorded by taking screen grabs, dating and filing them. It’s also worth taking time to record the home page, the contacts pages and sometimes other pages – like the annual accounts or details of the web designer.

The next stage was to see what other sites these linked to or were associated with so I could check them out too. There is a site at touchgraph.com that uses Google to give you a map of the internet that lets you centre on a site and see what other sites it links to. If one site is lifting your work then its relatives are worth a closer look.

Not everyone knows about the Wayback Machine, the internet archive at archive.org. This is a very nice tool that lets you go back in time to see what was on a site at a date in the past. Once I’d found an infringing site I could see when it first appeared, how it looked on different dates. The archive is far from complete and there are gaps but in many cases it has proved that the images were used before the date given by the publisher. In other cases it’s saved me time by confirming the honesty of the publisher’s response.

Jurisdiction

Of the dozen sites I found, I knew it would be a waste of time pursuing the two which were based in the States. I complained anyway and the images were removed but it wasn’t worth the time of even trying to get paid. The US have their own system for registration of copyright and it’s a total pain. If you aren’t registered you’re unlikely to get anywhere at all. In fact any ripoff outside of your own country is almost certainly going to be too expensive and difficult to enforce.