Agreed on all points. But these guys don't give a shit and nobody's out there policing this stuff. Your best defense is to watermark your images because it discourages sites from stealing your images. It's really embarrassing for a website to have pictures on their site that have someone's copyright and website on there because it shows the world how and where they stole them from. Furthermore, it's really a pain in the ass to clean up those images and most of the scraper sites are too lazy to take it to that level. Originally Posted by bizzly1001First, most of the pictures people have that are watermarked aren't copyrighted, putting a watermark doesn't make it copyrighted, it's fairly easy to remove a watermark, you're better off have metadata encoded in the picture. one thing people have to realize, you post a picture online it's out there, are they making money off your pictures, are you making money from people contacting you from those sites, do you turn down the people that contact you. do you want to turn off that revenue stream. most likely they aren't selling your pictures and most likely aren't charging people to see your contact information. most likely making money selling banner ads and affiliate links.
In a way it's a win win, you get free marketing and make new contacts.