Iphone Covers Turning Up On Amazon

Here are the 3 sellers that I have found so far for the one particular Iphone cover.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00VVR0WW2/sr=8-1/qid=1433335034/ref=olp_product_details?

ie=UTF8&me=&qid=1433335034&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Case-iPhone-Abstract-Blue-Reflection/dp/B00VN9UQWY/ref=pd_ybh_1

http://www.amazon.com/Quality-Reflection-Abstract-Provided-Elizabethsigel/dp/B00Y3UA0W6/ref=sr_1_18?s=wireless&ie=UTF8&qid=1433333517&sr=1-18&keywords=blue+reflection+abstract+iphone.

Here is my reference to my original artwork. http://fineartamerica.com/featured/blue-reflection-abstract-michael-c-geraghty.html

Michael, have you heard anything back from Amazon yet? I took a look at the "ElizabethSigel" stuff, and she has 134 pages of various phone cases for sale. They include a lot of sports and celebrity shots. Hope you get it straightened out.

I am sorry. It's been said numerous times already but I will reiterate for anyone who has not seen. The placement will not change.

Only yesterday I had yet another artist asking us to make sure the watermark is removed before printing as she was loathe to use it, not wanting people to have that on their prints!

A week or two ago a customer came through to tech instead of CS saying she was disgusted that we were selling lovely pictures with an ugly FAA across them and she would go elsewhere!

Here is another one which is for now 4 sellers with only ten minutes of searching.

I advise you to check out these sellers as they are capturing FAA images.


http://www.amazon.com/Cliffcato-Quality-Reflection-Abstract-Perfect/dp/B00YLRX8JS/ref=sr_1_36?ie=UTF8&qid=1433336986&sr=8-36&keywords=abstract+blue+reflection

Abbie, I understand your comment and maybe another methodology needs putting in place apart from the watermark issue and don't forget that all these other outlets are costing FAA money as well as the artists. To entice people to buy FAA products it may pay if there is a for sale only on FAA comment somewhere in the page and then artists that are offering the products for sale only on FAA have a pointer to buyers who may alert that it is for sale elsewhere. Whatever method is eventually implemented, we obviously need more protection for our work in the whole industry of digital work. Most of these sites copy full sets of images with automatic image capture complete with titles, and any automated downloads of images from FAA with large numbers of images could be picked up on the server.

Hope the situation changes, as I have lots of new works but am getting very reluctant to release them without watermark placement in place.

Thanks for the feedback Greg!.

Michael - did you get any response from Amazon?

Maybe I'm a little naive but how are these people delivering product? Do they have an El Cheapo way of making the cases? I understand that that is not the issue here, just curious.

There's a form somewhere on Amazon where you can report copyright abuse but I can't find it just now. However you can email them directly at this email address copyright@amazon.com
and write them a letter stating the following: the links where the abuse occurs; the statement "Proof of my copyright ownership can be found at the following urls", then list the urls where your original work can be found; then add these statements: "I have a good-faith belief that the disputed use is not authorized by me, the copyright owner, my agent, or the law. Under penalty of perjury, the information in my statement is accurate, and I am the copyright owner."

I've done it both ways, with the form on Amazon and with a letter to the email address. I wouldn't bother contacting the sellers directly...chances are pretty good that they'll just ignore you.

Bill, they just print off your low resolution image on the case. Cheap knock-offs.

Gee maybe they saw recent news about Richard Prince and figured they can do it too.

Dave Gordon
http://dgportfolio.net

I found the contact form on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/reports/contact-us

Here's what Amazon says to do:

"Select one of the sub-categories and enter the details of the possible violation. Please be sure to include the following information, as applicable:

* The ASIN/ISBN of the item’s detail page and the product title
* The store or business name of the seller you are reporting
* Your order ID
* A concise explanation of the violation

All reports are thoroughly investigated by our investigations team and they will contact the seller from their end. For privacy reasons, the results of our investigations cannot be disclosed; however, disciplinary actions will be taken as appropriate."

Good luck!

ETA: David, it's been going on for many years. I found hundreds of phone cases and a couple of other products for sale with my images on them.

Claim Copyright Infringement

Amazon respects the intellectual property of others. If you believe that your work has been copied in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, follow the notice and procedure for the Amazon site where you identified the infringement.

To claim copyright infringement, please submit your complaint using our online form. We respond quickly to concerns of rights owners about any alleged infringement.

If you prefer to submit a report in writing, please provide us with this information:

An electronic or physical signature of the person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright interest;
A description of the copyrighted work that you claim has been infringed upon;
A description of where the material you claim is infringing is located on the site;
Your address, telephone number, and e-mail address;
A statement by you that you have a good-faith belief that the disputed use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law;
A statement by you, made under penalty of perjury, that the above information in your notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on the copyright owner's behalf.
Amazon.com's Copyright Agent for notice of claims of copyright infringement on its site can be reached as follows:

Copyright Agent

Amazon.com Legal Department

P.O. Box 81226

Seattle, WA 98108

Phone: (206) 266-4064

Fax: (206) 266-7010

E-mail: copyright@amazon.com

Courier address:

Copyright Agent

Amazon.com Legal Department

410 Terry Avenue North

Seattle, WA 98109-5210

USA

Note: This procedure is exclusively for notifying Amazon that your copyrighted material has been infringed.

I have not contacted Amazon directly yet Bill as I thought I would give the sellers the chance to remove them first, now while being nice I am no fool and will target them right across the planet if they do not take notice as I have become quite masterful at checking origins in the last 35 years on computers and will cost them a lot more than they cost me.

Thanks for the Amazon link Peggy, that will be my next approach if the request to the sellers fails.

The plain and simple fact is the people that do this in a big way do not want any input from themselves and use automated capture software and this is where they key to stopping them works or has some chance of success,intelligent server software that detects certain levels of activity with file access in a non random fashion which indicates an automated process. Now while it is not an easy task because search engines use similar methods to index a site,but I believe that the server activity is the best place to start.

Sean has always had my backup because of his dedicated development of new features and services available on FAA, and no doubt the methods of theft have become a major irritation right across the industry, so maybe a think tank is in order right across the industries to try and combat the events.

Peggy and Edward, thank you both for your helpful feedback!.

It is simple to remove watermarks....http://www.theinpaint.com/inpaint-how-to-remove-watermark-from-a-picture.html

There are individuals/companies that will remove watermarks on your art for someone else to use. They advertise on the internet.

So much for watermark protection.

Partially transparent or opaque watermarks are easy to remove, but solid watermarks are not quite so easy as interpolation of the pixel values either side of the watermark is required to fudge the bits that are missing under the watermark.

Michael-

The watermark "geeks" can do a great job, transparent, opaque, solid. Even move the moon from one side of a picture to the other without anyone knowing..

Maybe you can find some FAA art on http://tuataracovers.com/39-specials....or one of the hundreds of other China sites.

Since the majority of art on FAA is larger than a phone case, a section can be extracted and printed to fit the case.

In comparing the phone case with your FAA art, the colors and graphics are varied in the squares. Not the same but almost.

Michael,

I'm wondering if this "person" is also scamming Amazon. ALL three sellers have the same amount of phone cases for sale, 400. They might be selling these and then disappearing from Amazon and not delivering anything. I would contact Amazon about that fact to,

Rich

I checked that as well Rich , all accounts recently set up, all with lots of identical images from FAA , so possibly it is a rogue trader who has set up multiple accounts with the same images. Because I have sold a number of the particular cases lately, I think that they are picking up stats from the recently sold FAA page. I do intend to contact Amazon as you suggested.

I just browsed through some, but not nearly all, of the cases from one of the vendors (Winona) that Michael gave a link for. I did see one case that I think (not 100% sure) is an image by another photographer that I know of who is not on FAA. Anyway, I sent him a message via a photo forum to let him know and provided the link. He lives in another country, so if it is his image, hopefully it won't be too difficult for him to deal with. If at least a few people can report these image thefts to Amazon, maybe they will do something about it.

I wonder whether any of these sellers have made any sales.

Michael,

Is there any place on Amazon to check seller's history, like eBay has? That might confirm this is one person,looking for a bunch of orders to come in and disappear!

Rich

Turns out that the image was stolen from the photographer that I mentioned in my previous post. Looks like they took it from a flickr page.

I agree, go straight to amazon.
I have found that items not fulfilled by amazon are often fakes.
I bought a speck brand iphone case and when defective, the warranty was not honored because it was fake even though it was new in package when I bought it - since then, if it is an item that I care about being real, I only buy off amazon if fulfilled by amazon. The granola bars I buy for my office, on the other hand, I don't care if they are fake and still buy from sellers who fulfill.

This one is showing as 'currently unavailable'. :-)

There is a bunch of Mondrian Iphone coves on one of them also which I am pretty sure is one of our artists, Richard ? will have a check.

It's a never ending battle with Amazon, unfortunately. If you email the address with the info you were given above, they will remove it. BUT...they close down the sellers and the sellers just open a new account and start all over. I've had a conversation with Amazon staff about this. They do not verify their sellers, nor do they want to pay staff to put on the project of verifying their sellers. I basically told them I won't be shopping at Amazon until the website no longer allows stolen copies of my work on the site. (however they have to make that happen) I haven't shopped with Amazon since last year as a result. I know the $5-$10K myself and others in my household and office spent there is just a tiny drop in the bucket to them and they could care less. But I feel better not giving my money to a website who is allowing stolen work from me on the site. I looked about a week or so ago just to check on my work, and once again, stolen copies (phone cases, pillows, prints etc) were still rampant throughout the site.

How is it possible to even find out if any of your images have been taken and put onto Amazon products? This Cliff Cato seller has over 67,000 phone cases. Is there an easy way to search? This person couldn't possibly have created all of those images nor could he have taken them manually. Most likely the result of a scraper bot. The FAA 900px size giveaway not helpful either.

Dave Gordon
http://dgportfolio.net

Wow. How do you even begin to search--there are so many for just this one seller alone. Every single one of this seller's offering appear to be stolen--the images aren't even centered.

Hi all, I'm a newbie and t have been reading various discussion threads trying to get a feel for how to set things up before diving in. So 'thank you' to all who post helpful things! :)

Regarding this issue, I wonder if you could go the back-route on them through the credit card processing somehow, since they're selling stolen images. You might check with your CC company and see if you order one of the items with your image, if you can then dispute it legally someway with them, as it's a fraudulent transaction. Especially if you have proof you've notified them of the violation. Maybe enough pressure can get their processing privileges taken away?

"How is it possible to even find out if any of your images have been taken and put onto Amazon products?

Or any other of a million places on the net that are probably selling your images.

That is a 30 hour a day job trying to corral that problem and you ain't ever even going to put a dent in it.

"Maybe enough pressure can get their processing privileges taken away? "

Sure, and then 3 more just like them pop up in the next 30 days.


What is happening here is by trying to stop all of these bootleggers from selling your art where there is no real hard money loss, they are preventing you from concentrating on selling your are where there is a direct and very real money loss to you.

Welcome to selling on the Internet. Have fun.

I gave up on getting my illicit stuff off Amazon the day they told me I'd have to send them a url for each offending seller. I tried sending them a link to the search I did for just one of my pictures which turned up hundreds of phone cases and some mousepads. I wasn't going to take the time to copy and paste hundreds of url's, knowing full well that once those sellers were removed, others would take their place. I'd prefer to spend my time in other ways.

As Floyd pointed out, you ain't ever going to put a dent in it.

Peggy - help make the rest of us smart -- what kind of a "search" did you do? How did you tailor a search to find your images? Did you search within Amazon, or did you do a Google image search, or something else? Thanks!

Most of the artwork has it's original titles as shown on FAA, as they just want to copy everything as is without any input themselves. so searching for your work with it's original title should be enough. I would start by looking at what you have recently sold as they appear to be collecting the ones who have had recent sales from the recently sold page, so look at your most popular and latest sales and search for them to see if you find any first.

Bill, in my case I believe my image was either lifted from another POD or possibly from my Flickr site. I did a search on Amazon for "squirrel drinking" ('cause that's what the picture is) after someone alerted me to a single instance of infringement.

About a year ago when I checked there were 711 pages of returns for the search term "squirrel drinking" and I found 30 cases of infringement on the first five pages alone. It doesn't look quite so bad now...back then, most of the cases had my picture on them.

Personally, I shop for the best "steals" and if I can get your art on a phone case for $8 on Amazon and free ship with Prime, I will.

I'll never understand how I can get a lens hood shipped from China for a few bucks (and it shows up in a few days) and then meanwhile it costs $7-$8 to have a throw pillow case shipped domestically.

Another weird one. I have a book on Amazon that I've only sold a few copies so far. Yet there are 10 people selling "used" copies of it. Basically they undercut my sales with some kind of sellers account because they are willing to make 25 cents on a sale.

Edward-

"I'll never understand...."

Very smart and shrewd "foreign" marketers!

Maybe that's why America is number 11 on the worldwide educational scale.

Just to update people on the emails I sent to Amazon sellers asking them to remove my work, all of the sellers which was about 5 have now withdrawn the product or have got a not currently available notice on the image. I did not think it would work by asking the individuals to remove them first, but they all have which is good news.

I'm new here and honestly my head started spinning around when i saw this discussion. Thanks Michael for bringing this up for us to know . I hope FAA make a move and start thinking about the valuable time and talent that artists are putting in their works , or our art works will be a true waste of space

I still think we need a bigger watermark I used to have my logo watermark in the middle of my work. I stated the watermark would be removed when the art was purchased. I think faa should offer a watermark something that says maybe sample photo or something like that to protect our work here. Not sure why people can't understand that once they buy a print or art that the wwtermark is than removed. The little watermark in the corner is easy to crop out of our pictures and adds no protection .

MD - So creating an industry based on knock offs and copycat products is the result of a top ten educational system?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00VVR0WW2/sr

not functioning

but I did find it on Ioffer

About watermarks and clients being put off by them...

Every other agency uses watermarks. The solution is easy and takes a webmaster 10 minutes to do:

add prominent watermark to all images - look at how alamy.com does it
change the text on buy button to:

Buy now to remove watermark.

having this adition would increase fineartamerica and pixels attraction to photographers 10-fold and swell your image bank, & thereby potential sales

FAA has made it plain that they think Watermarks hinder the sale of images.

Isabella says that she still has FAA members that think Watermarks are part of the image and are worried they won't be removed.

Such is the world of POD services and the unsophistication of the folks who are set loose to sell their work in it. Anyone who has been around art/photographic reproduction work and the advertising of images for any length of time realizes that Watermarks are there for security purposes. But we have so many amateur members ( that is not meant to be criticism) that uneducated comments are made like that to Isabella.

Perhaps a quick introductory class as to what to expect, and need to understand, in joining FAA would be good before setting all the little kiddies loose!

(I say that lovingly)...I was once a little kiddie