Today was not a very good day.  Along with my house purchasing ordeal and my mom’s hospital planning for Friday, I was alerted to one of my photographs that I took being displayed on the godawful site icanhascheezburger.com.  The picture is on the main site, but for purposes of this writing, please do not give this site any more traffic just to see what I’m talking about.

The picture is one that I took of my cats, Aeris and Cloud.  The picture is of them sticking their tongues out at the camera.  Apparently at some point, someone stole this image off my ohheather.com website, uploaded it to this website, put some unfunny and horribly written English on the photo and it is now displayed on their page.

A couple of things.  I watermark all of my images that I intend to display for just such an occurance.  I didn’t watermark this because it’s a picture of my cats.  Now as I understand it, just because it’s not watermarked doesn’t mean I do not own the copyright.  I actually display a copyright notice at the bottom of my page just in case someone doesn’t get it.

I sent them a notice that this picture was not uploaded by me, nor did I give authorization for anyone to use this picture without my consent.  They wrote me back via email saying they would gladly give me credit and a link back to my site, but offered to remove the image upon further request for removal.  I replied back that I indeed want removal.  Their response was that I needed to send them a letter via mail to their address in Seattle stating how I own the picture and where the image is located, at that point they would remove the image.

So as you can guess, I got angrier at their reply.  Of course no one needs to certify via mail that the image they are uploading belongs to them, but in order for this company to remove it, they must receive a letter via mail.  I decided to play their game.  I wrote a document stating that I owned it, didn’t authorize it, where the original is located and they must remove it, via Certified Mail.

This whole thing is very stupid.  They are basically making ad revenue off of a picture that was illegally obtained/claimed ownership by someone else, passed along as someone else’s work and now refuse to remove the image (thus far).

Please don’t visit this website, and the lesson is learned.  If you’re going to upload something, make sure it has a copyright notice or make it unusable by someone else.  I don’t care about the money aspect as much, but someone that is not me should not take my stuff and pass it along as belonging to someone else.