Oi ya b*st*rds you've stolen my pug picture

[gallery]At the time of writing, this photo has had 992 comments on Facebook, 1,730 likes and been shared 210 times. It’s on the Facebook page of the ASPCA, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
The ASPCA did not seek or gain permission to use the image.
Using TinEye, the reverse image search engine, I found four other websites have published the image. There are probably more out there.
For any creative, copyright is crucial. It protects their work and helps ensure they earn money from it. If a photographer (whatever their level of ability or professionalism) lets any organisation use any image for free they are an idiot photographer.
They are allowing flattery – or vanity – to cloud their judgement and they devalue the commodity of the photograph for the entire industry. If anyone would like a more in-depth discussion on this then please get in touch.

That’s not to say I am draconian about my images. I have, on occasion, allowed free use of my images for what I deem worthy causes. Indeed I have allowed this image to be used by a dog blog website in Ottawa, Canada.
What I have never done is allowed commercial businesses or similar organisations to use my images for free and, believe me, I’ve had many requests.
I allowed the dog blog to use it because they asked nicely. And the important thing is that they do ask. Nicely.
The ASPCA, along with 5minute5.com, untoldenterainment.com, yazarkafe.hurriyet.com (don’t ask) and electricgrandmother.com never asked for permission to use the image. If they found it on google, they may have had difficulty discovering the author as the embedded IPTC information has been stripped out.
But that is no excuse for a failure to reply to emails when contacted about the use of unauthorised images. I emailed all four websites, asking them to contact me about publishing this image without permission. Only 5minute5.com replied, offering an apologetic email and the offer to remove the image or credit it.
I’m particularly annoyed that the ASPCA, a reputable organisation, has not replied to my email. Too busy searching for other images to steal?
I have reported them to Facebook and have yet to see the outcome of that. Don't fail me Facebook.
I took this photo several years ago at my parent’s house in Newcastle. The pug is called Arthur. The french fries are called chips.

Palm trees in the Czech Republic

[gallery]Looking up at some palm trees in Luxor, Egypt. I took this photo in 2005.
Sitting on the banks of the Nile, shielding under the trees from the hot midday sun. The image represents some sort of paradise.
The reality is slightly different. I was lying on my back on carefully cultivated grass in the hotel grounds of Sofitel Luxor. If you look closely, you can see a hotel speaker nailed to one of the trees.
A few months after I took the photo I did the decent thing and uploaded it to flickr, the amazingly friendly, hugely addictive photo-sharing website.
Six years later and it has enjoyed a modest 1,166 views. But in the last few months it has regularly been my most viewed picture of the day. I have 1,511 images on flickr.
Why is a photo, uploaded in September 2005, still being viewed half a dozen times a day? No idea. It’s an example of the brilliance and quirkiness of flickr.
What I do know is that a media website in the Czech Republic – tn.cz - stole the image from flickr to use as the cover image for an advert slideshow above a story which has something to do with palm trees.
You can see my stolen image on the screengrab (below).
Anyone who can read Czech who would like to do a translation or contact these thieving sh!ts and demand compensation, drop me a line.

NOTE: How did I find out about the use of my images by tn.cz? I used the fantastic reverse image search called TinEye.
A free online search tool, you can submit one of your images and TinEye will search for it and modified versions on millions of websites around the world.
It was the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. It's very clever.