I once had this case where a young lady from England tried to sell a couple of Infocom games via ebay.com. I stumbled across them and lo and behold, the pictures she used were taken from my Infocom site.
Now, I don't really have a problem with people using my scans, provided they a) ask me before they do and b) make the bidders aware the image does not show the actual item. The latter because most of my images are heavily retouched to give perfect appearances - it would severely mislead buyers about the condition of the actual box sold. Trying to play nice I got in contact with the young lady first, and made her aware that I'm aware. She denied using my images. So I filed a complaint with ebay and after some forth and back and finally having me swear that the images are indeed mine and that in the case I lie devastating punishments would fall upon me, ebay removed the auctions. Young lady relisted her items with the small addition "item relisted due to picture copyright issues" and they unfortunately then went unsold. The previous bidders did not feel inclined to bid again. Lesson to learn: Ebay is *not* powerless and what holds true for pictures is also true for text. Both fall under copyright law if they are your original work. To prevent future incidents like this I now stamped most of my images with my URL and because of the growing number of people remote linking my images I started to block hits on them via .htaccess, when the referring URL does not come from my domain. Marco Chris Newman schrieb: > > That brings up a good question. How do you prevent someone from listing > auctions whose sellers have stolen your write-up? That drives me nuts -- > I invest so much time and effort to compile a detailed, and descriptive > ad, often with my personal experiences of the game in question. For > someone to come along and, for example, use my description of why King's > Quest IV SCI was both visually stunning, and a quantum leap in the > vibrance of animated adeventures in my gaming life makes me feel used. > I've had characters not only lift my ads but actually link to my > webhosted site to use my box scans and screenshots! Grrrr! > > What can you do to stop this? Ebay says its powerless but that's NO > surprise. > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent to you because you are currently subscribed to the swcollect mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of 'unsubscribe swcollect' Archives are available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
