copyright of photos in DG

Please excuse my ignorance, if proved so, as I don't often read all threads related to a topic, as I may raise question already answered before:

Petromarula pinnata is a wild perennial plant endemic to Crete, and I was blessed with some of them in my land. Seeing that there were no good photos of it in the Internet, I took one that I personally really like, and gave it to the plantfiles in DG, with the copyright on it very well given by the DG technical people. This happened (I think) 2 years ago. I am very happy to see it displayed, it is in wonderful colors and big dimensions.
http://davesgarden.com/pf/showimage/16642/

Yesterday I searched the photos in Google and found that several people (or sites, or whatever) have copied it and even show it with gloomed color tones.

Question: Does DG chase those people, do I chase them, do we leave things alone ?

Can I sell the same photo elsewhere as well?

Comments and advice welcome

Dimitri

I think the appropriate first step if you don't like them using your pic without permission would be to contact the people who used it and try to work things out nicely with them. If they won't be nice about it, then the copyright does give you certain legal rights but I'm not sure of the correct process to take legal action (and unless you're a commercial artist and it's hurting you financially to have someone else using your picture, it may be more trouble than it's worth to go through the process).

As far as you doing other things with the picture, it's your picture so I think you can do whatever you want with it so if you want to give someone else the right to use the picture somewhere I think that's allowed. DG does the copyright thing to protect us and our pictures so that people will feel comfortable contributing their photos, not so that DG is the only place in the world you can find that picture.

I do recall a thread about this a while ago so you might want to do some searching, it might have been on this forum or possibly on the Plant Files forum.

Hi Dimitri, it's good to hear from you!

We certainly pursue that kind of thing, but we often don't know about it unless it's reported. Now that it is reported, I would encourage Terry to go to those sites and send them our scary takedown notice.

To answer your other question: you still own full rights to your images and can do what you like with them. :)

best,
dave

Dmitri, I sent you a note about one vendor using your image. To be honest, I'm not having much luck finding other places that used it - can you send me links to the sites, or tell me what key words you used to search Google's images? (I tried searching by the common name and species name...)

LOL "Scary takedown notice". GO GET 'EM TERRY!

A few places do use my photos but they were kind enough to ask first. That is as it should be. :)

Yep. We have a pro-forma letter that's......well......I guess you could say it's very direct and to-the-point, and doesn't leave much room for misinterpretation.

I had someone offer to pay for a pic I posted in PF. They wanted a bigger copy of it though. I replied and said I could send it, but they never got back to me on it. Good thing I didn't send the larger copy of it........wonder if they went ahead and used the small version?

Dave and Terry and everyone else, I am grateful for your interest in the matter.

I searched for pictures in Google giving "petromarula pinnata".

What is "Annie's" ? They say that p. pinnata is monocarpal, and I know particular plants that are at least 5 years old - yet I never managed to isolate a single seed on the many stalks (sometimes more than 20 flower stalks on a single plant, with more than 50 flowers on each) - perhaps I will need a microscope for that purpose. And they do not flower for more than a month - at the end of the flowering season the stalks look ugly.

I acknowledge I mistook a genuine picture as a copy of mine:
http://www.pharmakobotanik.de/gallery/mediterr.htm
but I was wrong; I fell on the page of a gigantic german photographer/botanist and learned a lot about Cretan plants I did not know, and also found out I can provide DG with unique pictures since some of them I have.

At least they have not copied my unique black dracunculus vulgaris that DG plantfiles have, and my cistus incanus pic is not found as "incanus" at all in the german link above.


I will try to post my plant pics on some photo libraries on the net and see what fish I catch.

Dave, soon I will have some fresh pics of native Cretan plants for your PF. This whole story stimulated me.

Thanks to all.
Dimitri