The Case of the Borrowed Buddha
Summary: This case involves an image placed on a popular online artist's social networking site, Deviantart.
The artist, we'll call her Jo, has had a profile on the huge online social networking site DeviantART for a few years. She has a number of copyright protected images in her gallery. Although DeviantART gives artists the option of placing a "Creative Commons" license on their images, she has never done this, always retaining her full copyright. One image in her Deviant gallery is a photomanipulation of a Buddha.
She was using Google images one day and on a whim she decided to enter her Deviantart profile name into the search box. The first two pages of search results showed the images on her Deviantart profile, but she was quite surprised to see one of her Buddha image linked to a strange website.
Intrigued, she clicked on the link and saw that someone had taken one of her images and was using it by linking directly to her Deviantart gallery page. Direct linking is greatly frowned upon because the person doing the direct linking is not only stealing the image but also stealing valuable bandwidth from the host server. It's a double theft. In this case however, the direct linking had a positive consequence - it left evidence that Google could follow and it allowed Jo to determine that someone was using an image from her Deviantart gallery without permission.
The page was in an unfamiliar language but by poking around the site, she gathered that it was a gaming forum site and that one of the users had used her image as a profile icon. She was surprised and a bit flattered that someone had liked her image enough to steal it, although she felt it would have been polite for them to ask first.
She wasn't particularly worried about the theft because she had a strict policy of only uploading low resolution images with small pixel dimensions. She felt that any images placed on the web were bound to be stolen, so if someone was going to steal one of her images, they would get something that was too low in resolution to be of any commercial value. She did, however, re-think her habit of uploading images without watermarks or the copyright symbol displayed on them. The presence of a watermark would probably have discouraged direct linking in this case.
Return to top of page
Disclaimer
These pages are for educational purposes only. This site offers a combination of fact, anecdotal information and editorial opinion of the writer, none of which should be construed as legal advice. If you require legal assistance on any aspect of copyright law, please contact a lawyer.