Plagiarism & Social Media

[Tim Mayo]

It was recently brought to my attention that a long-standing member in the Sony Alpha Wildlife Shooters Group that I run had been caught manipulating another photographers image and attempting to pass it off as their own.

They are someone who is very active in the Sony community, receives gear from Sony early and many here will know their name.

The crazy thing here is that they stole an image of an even more popular photographer in the Sony community, flipped it and then added a water splash at the bottom.

The image itself was so iconic that a number of people noticed this and called them out on it. They then publicly apologised to the photographer that they stole the image from.

I removed this member from the Wildlife Group and all of the other Facebook Groups where they post, but I expect they will continue to post in other groups and places.

I've scratched my head over this quite a bit as this person is a very capable photographer in their own right, at least that's the image they present.

It begs the question, why did they do this?

Likes.

They wanted the likes on social media to feed their ego. I can't think of any other reason. If it wasn't for social media there would have been no point in stealing someone else's image and attempting to pass it off as their own work.

It's sad but that's the world we live in today. Thankfully I'm sure that 99 percent of photographers wouldn't dream of plagiarising another photographers work for a few bloody likes.

Hopefully AI can be used productively in the future to highlight when an image has already been posted by someone else, or is so similar to another image it might have been manipulated.

I don't think anyone has ever stolen my images that I'm aware of, probably because most of them are naff!

Has anyone here ever had images stolen? If so, how did you find out and what action did you take?

P.S
Please don't ask as I won't be naming this person here I'm afraid.

 

[Richard A]

A member of a camera club I was in back in the day did something similar. This was in the very early days of digital but if I remember correctly, it was actually a film image. I can't really remember the details of how they did it as I never saw the copied image or the copy. I think he entered it in an international competition so I don't know how he expected to get away with it.

He was banned from being a member of a camera club by the governing body of our club for one year. After that time was up he wrote a letter to the committee asking if he could rejoin. Our club patron was actually a judge and his advice was that he had done his time and we should seriously consider letting him rejoin the club. There were 9 people on the committee including me. We had a vote and everyone other than myself and one other voted not to allow him to rejoin. Social media was of course in it's infancy back then.

I could never work out why he did it and, to be honest, before this, never believed that someone would do something like that. Maybe I was a bit naive.

 

[FowlersFreeTime]

Like I used to say in school days: if you copy my homework, you deserve the resulting bad grades LOL! Nobody would want to copy my images

I get the allure of posting an image for likes. If I used ON1 sky replacement to augment some of my photos, I'm sure I could grab more attention and get more likes on social media. However, I would know it wasn't authentic and it would shame me; worse if I copied someone else's work. That moral compass seems to need calibrating in quite a few people online...

 

[iain clyne]

Unfortunately it’s something that goes on. I can’t understand the logic in it, most of us want to progress our photography to a higher level but stealing someone else’s photo is not the way to do it.

 

[Loke]

I dont think my images are very stealable That beeing said, its very sad that a person does this, most for himself. It's probably like you said, for likes. Getting their daily fix of dopamine from all the likes popping in.

I'll admit, i like the feeling aswell. Whenever i post an image on instagram or on this forum, ofcourse i like getting likes, but not so much that i'll steal someone elses work.

When i've done a good job in my work, i've had co-workers trying to take their share of success even when they had nothing to do with it, guess its kinda the same thing.

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

I'll admit, i like the feeling aswell. Whenever i post an image on instagram or on this forum, ofcourse i like getting likes

Instagram I don't care about, and rarely post there. Other people post my concert pics, and this pleases me, even if they do so without credit. I like that my pics are useful.

I do like getting likes on forums, because its a limited community of respected people.

If someone really thinks that the other guy's pics can score higher than theirs, then why don't they just endeavour to do the same or similar? Then at least they can honestly put their name to it. Might not be the most original artwork ever, but giving and taking ideas is one way to grow.

If, on the other hand, they take the actual pictures from some, then I'd guess that they must make a habit of it, and only get caught rarely.

 

[Unframed Dave]

I don't get it.

To me, a picture is a story. There are no exceptions. If it isn't my picture, it isn't my story, it has no relevance.

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

If it isn't my picture, it isn't my story

Excellent point!