[Leica] Copyrights and posted photos/thievery

[rangefinder at screengang.com (Didier Ludwig)]

Adam, Richard, Sonny

Most useful is to give abstract file names (or numbers) to your 
photographs, so they can't be found through picture searches. Once I had 
named a foto of my son "petit coquin", which means little scallywag (or 
similar) in french, and had ignored that "coquin" is a term frequently used 
in the (french) porn business. Suddenly I had tons of altavista and google 
image search hits on that image. I renamed all files and the folder.

I agree that its easy to take away any copyright notice, unvisible 
watermarks, file informations or whatever, and without loosing picture 
quality, by the way. But many dont know how to do, or are too lazy for 
that. That's why I leave a little, discreet copyright notice.

And I agree thats there's a new mentality about "intellectual property" in 
the digital world, that means that there's no "intellectual property" at all.

Nevertheless, I don't care much if a image with less than a million px. is 
used without my permission. The only abuse could be by using it for the 
web, as its too small for printing. Some are hotlinking to my original 
photos; but as I run my own webserver with unlimited data transfer, I dont 
care about bandwith abuse. Though it would cost me a few mouse clicks to 
inhibit it.

Didier