Who Stole your photographs? What can you do?

I was followed by BreakingPhoto on Twitter and had a brief scan down their tweets as I do with everyone that follows me... I found a tweet by them that linked to Thomas Hawk's blog post here... Which led me to the following bunch of cheap bastards, Wapfever dot com.

If you go to the link below (Hate that I'm giving them traffic) and search for yourself... You may be interested to find that they are stealing your photos too..

http://wapfever.com/picsearch/upload/search.php -- Hosted on GoDaddy.com

So, what can you do? Well... it's a right royal pain in the bottom that hosting companies make it SO BLOODY HARD to get your stuff pulled from these sites... but the following is what will work best...

1. Go to the page linked below, it's the GoDaddy "someone stole my stuff" page...

GoDaddy Trademark & Copyright page

2. There's a link to a form, click it, fill out the form and print it out...

Please print form along with your identification and email to trademarkclaims@godaddy.com or FAX to Trademark Department at 480-247-4137. Please allow 3 business days for an initial response. The trademark claims department can not process your request without the 'Trademark Tracking ID' listed at the top of the form.

3. Then you should do yourself an email with the following points covered in as much detail as possible, and email it to TrademarkClaims@godaddy.com

Here's the information you need to put in your submission.. *BE VERY ACCURATE*

• Sufficient evidence that the party posting the trademark that is claimed to be infringing is a Go Daddy customer.
• The trademark, service mark, trade dress, name, or other indicia of origin ("mark") that is claimed to be infringed.
• The jurisdiction or geographical area to which the mark applies.
• The name, post office address and telephone number of the owner of the mark identified above.
• The goods and/or services covered by or offered under the mark identified above.
• The date of first use of the mark identified above.
• The date of first use in interstate commerce of the mark identified above.
• The mark the Complaining Party believes is an infringement of its mark.
• The goods and/ or services covered by or offered under the mark claimed to be infringing.
• The precise location of the infringing mark, including electronic mail address, etc.
• A good faith certification, signed under penalty of perjury, stating:
  1. The mark [identify mark] infringes the rights of another party,
  2. The name of such said party,
  3. The mark [identify mark] being infringed, and
  4. That use of the mark [identify mark] claimed to be infringing at issue is not defensible.

Now, does this always work? No... Will you immediately feel redeemed? No... If enough of us show that we're damned unhappy with the whole scraping our content and using it thing, will we get anywhere? Probably not... What's the only way to stop this happening? -- Go back to shooting film and buy yourself a nice, leather bound, photo album... (Don't get depressed)

I hope this helps someone!