TinEye as a photography plagiarism tracker
3 min readAs a photography hobbyist I am starting to expand my exposure and direction as an artist. I haven’t focused the time I want to it for a number of reasons, but when I do I get down to business. Recently I posted one of my best shots to InterfaceLIFT, http://interfacelift.com/wallpaper_beta/details/2246/sunset_over_moorea.html
, a high res. wallpaper site. There it was chosen to be featured and I ranked up over 150,000 downloads of it. From there I was contacted by several application developers and websites for permission to use it in their products. I agreed, only trading credit and links back to my sites.
A few days ago I was contacted by a web site designer from Australia asking permission to use my Sunset Over Moorea photograph for a hotel site. In our correspondence he brought up a cool little trick using a website called TinEye. http://www.tineye.com/ I knew about TinEye and played around with it when it first went live and really didn’t go back. But I was shown that TinEye can be used as a vey powerful photography plagiarism tracker.
Through the search I found that my photos that I posted to InterfaceLIFT were lifted and used all over the internet on various wallpaper sites including on business site. http://www.tineye.com/search/487bb3e53c030acc022704ca66d460cd14819598/
Putting my work out there in high res form, I cannot stop the spread of it. Wallpaper sites from China and Russia, so what. It’s done and nothing I can do about it. However, it was a different story with the ‘legit’ business site.
So I reached out to the company’s owner and informed him sternly that he ripped off my work and passed it off as his own without giving credit back to me. I gave him 3 options 1) post the credit and link back to me 2) Pay me 3) Take it down… he took it down. The ironic thing it of what he had in the site’s terms of service…
Ahhh, it made me laugh out loud.
So if you have photos out there check out TinEye and using their image recognition it’s a pretty good guide to see if your work/photos are being used on other sites.
End of Line.
Binary Blogger
Twitter – @binaryblogger
Binary Blogger has spent 20 years in the Information Security space currently providing security solutions and evangelism to clients. From early web application programming, system administration, senior management to enterprise consulting I provide practical security analysis and solutions to help companies and individuals figure out HOW to be secure every day.
Subscribe
Facebook Page
Follow Me On Twitter
contactme@binaryblogger.com
