After Google introduced the “reverse image search” I am sometimes looking where my work appears without a legal license and I decided to publish the most bizarre cases where my work was stolen. I found the pdf below via Google and it is an image I made a longer time ago, which is a portrait of Austrian writer Vea Kaiser in Prague. So far so good.

The original image is here:
http://photos.oka2.com/#!/index/G0000n7QSipzJqQ0/I0000b_3LICEFJnU

I contacted the publication http://www.lequotidien.lu/  in Luxembourg. I was in touch with the editor in chief who admitted that probably their correspondent “found” the image on Google and they just used it.

He admitted that they used the image without checking the copyright holder, without asking me as the author, without license fee and without mentioning my name as the creator of the photograph.

He seemed to be understandable, we agreed for a higher license fee then usual because of all the above mentioned infringements and he promised to pay my work, what unfortunately never happened. I contacted them several times again but never anybody replied, maybe they will now.

With bizarre in the beginning I meant that the case seems to be very clear but anyway the publication is waiting that I will sue them, probably expecting that I will not. The next step will be a copyright lawyer.

I had about 40 cases of copyright infringement in the last months and it is becoming more and more. I am not talking about bloggers which use my images without asking (they could ask and maybe I even would agree), but about commercial use on the internet and print. Here I found the image :

https://twitter.com/bressanserge/status/644751167352930304