What Makes a Photo Stealer?

I’ve been getting a ton of tips to thieves and general unsavory behaviors for the past few months and I wanted to clear up what makes me post a thief.

1.  They have to be a photographer.  I get TONS of posts about models stealing other pictures, designers stealing other graphics, businesses stealing images for use and so forth.  As much fun as it would be to out every person with sticky fingers on the internet, it’s just not possible and to make this blog work I have to streamline it.

2.  The photographer had to actually steal the image, not just mimic a pose/location/style.  I’ve got quite a few submissions from people complaining about someone stealing their style or pose.  While it’s VERY annoying it’s not illegal, just unethical.

3.  The photographer has to have a web presence WITH the stolen photographs.  Craigslist ads are a given that they are going to be a mess.  If it is JUST a Craigslist ad with no other web based presence, then I can’t publish it as it’s hard to really follow up on and those ads disappear pretty quickly.  Still unethical but I frankly don’t have the time to make a post to every single stolen image on Craigslist.  I’d need to quit photography to do this!

4.  They have to have stolen photographs.  This means not stolen graphic elements or designs but they have to have photographs that they’ve stolen on their site.  An exception would be if they’ve stolen entire web content (about, blog posts etc) from another photographer because that’s a pet peeve of mine.