Re: Scumbag alert...helpful advice (please read)

[VintageMusclecar]

I apologise in advance for starting a new thread on an existing topic, but I have a suggestion for anyone else who uses ebay to help protect them against picture and/or ad theft, and I didn't want this to get lost in the other thread.

Given the fact that pic and/or ad theft has become such a problem on ebay, I've started photoshopping ALL of my pictures I put in my ebay ads with a copyright with my website address. I suppose you could also use an email address, or perhaps your ebay username as an alternative. I put the text in the picture as to prevent someone else from trying to crop it from the image.



I know ebay has a policy against mentioning outside websites in order to make sales aside from ebay, but given the severity of this problem, I see no other alternative. I've yet to receive notice from ebay that I've broken any of their TOS', maybe I'm on borrowed time?

Just trying to help.

Eric

[Jeff Murphy]

And if you want to get really crazy, there is a service (www.digimarc.com) that you can purchase that actually embeds copyright information into the photos so that if they are brought up in a compliant photo program it identifies in the window that the image is owned by you and provides information on how you will allow the use of the image and contact details. All the photos on the SCR6 CD are done this way.

If you want to get even crazier, there is an option that includes a monitoring service that will identify if your shots are being used "anywhere" on the web and notify you. I thought about it for the SCR6 CD, but you guys are all trustworthy, right?

Kevin S. (SuperCars) you and Denis might want to consider this for the images on www.corvettes-musclecars.com since they get pinched so often...

[jg95z28]

FWIW, you don't need photoshop to tag images. Before I had it, I used MSPaint! which comes with the Windows operating system, to tag images for eBay. Not as elegant as PS, but it works!

[Denis]

[ QUOTE ]
...Kevin S. (SuperCars) you and Denis might want to consider this for the images on www.corvettes-musclecars.com since they get pinched so often

[/ QUOTE ]

Hi Jeff.

When Kevin's site first came online, I digitally watermarked all the images but after a few months, I stopped doing so.

People who ask to use the images are told they can do so for non-commercial, non-misleading, purposes. There were a few times that unscrupulous or unknowing people used them in a misleading fashion--say to sell an unrelated item on eBay--but after being asked nicely via email, they stopped.

I suppose we might be more concerned if the website was for-profit or if Kevin had something to gain from maintaining copyright of the photos.

[Jeff Murphy]

As long as you guys are OK with the response you've been getting from the thieves. I've pointed out eBay use 3 or 4 times to Kevin in the past. Seems to be a bit of an administrative headache either way...