Who here has their galleries stolen?

I will change the question to.

Who here has galleries?

I've seen part of my members area on Fusker, fucking bastards, but that's it that I know of.

So what do you do about it?

I think you cann't do anything.

Easily cropped out... there's programs that will do it in bulk batches (arles). File lawsuits and profit

I think you're right there.

Lawsuits against the sponsor and the hosts.

But if it's cropped out at least it's easy to prove and provides more work for the thief. You have to put the watermark in different places.

I found some of my stuff on Fusker.

First, there is a link at Fusker that you can send an email to them and ask that your site not be listed. That means, if the your images are downloaded with fusker, they are banned from appearing in the fusker board.

The bad thing is that you have to request the ban at all fusker boards... and there are about 8 of them.

Another thing I did was notify their hosting company. I did that with a hosting company in Dallas, and these guys actually notified the fusker site that they were wrong. Immediate action.

Just for your information... Fusker is a software that goes into the site and looks for image files. Then it bulk downloads everything it can find... including image buttons, clipart, logos etc.

Membership galleries can be downloaded too... but when these are posted on the Fusker site, the membership site normally asks for a user name and password. That means that the member with the password is the only one that sees the picture.

That leads to one other point... the pictures posted on fusker sites are hot linked images. So, they steal your images, and they hot link to save download bandwidth as well.

Charly, I think the only way to stop hot links and illegal downloads is to password your directories... But that means losing business... cuz if I can't see the face and action arena, then I won't buy. I think you have a pretty good system. More control will hinder sales in my opinion.

Which reminds me, I need to get over there and get that $25 special!!

It seems again Fusker is profitting from theft, something needs to be done about it.

Visa are currently in court with Perfect 10 and AC lost, both over profitting from theft.

It's not my job to make sure a site is not profitting from theft, it's their job.

On our site we have a URL on the larger images, content is stolen but it works as an advert to the site.

every fucking day. same with members area content.

And do they try to submit to TGPs/MPGs?

my gallery templates have been stolen but they often replace the content. it still sucks

of course. that's usually how they run into problems though... i'm what you could call 'connected' in that area.

Did you do anything about it?