In a future article I may write about the why - if ever you have been victimized by having thousands or ten thousands or more images and graphic art work stolen from your site, re-used on other "made-for-advertisement" sites or social network sites or blog sites at your expense, then you may know the difference between sharing for personal happiness of individual users and the stealing of your professional quality work for person al gain by greedy and or lazy ones.

Hence instead of going indepth into the details and legal aspects - latter rather being a possible topic of a highly skilled "class act lawsuit" lawyer's office willing to go thru the hard work of a xxx Million $ or Billion $ class act lawsuit against the copyright infringing server-owners, site owners and advertising networks or search with your preferred SE for

class act lawsuit
or
class action lawsuit

If the term class action - then read the definition of class action in the legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com. A class action lawsuit is a protection of a larger number of victimized people typically by the large $ industry ignoring the rights of regular people like you and me for the sole purpose of easy, lazy or fast money or just out of lacking care, lacking love for OTHERS. The only language such damaging industry understands normally is $-language - dozens, hundreds of Millions or as i a recent case Billions of us$ in the .8 billion settlement of Vioxx appears the only clear language CEOs understand. Hence class action lawyers may act like "guardian angels" of victims to efficiently stop further damage and to compensate at least partially for damage already imposed by the ruthless companies.Such a "settlement" is NO class action but a short cut of a legal path leading most likely into a far greater amount after much more time invested by all parties involved. Such settlements protect the damage causing company and it's ultimately responsible CEOs to have to spend the rest of their lives or substantial part thereof in jail - at taxpayers' expenses.

A fast and easy method to partially protect your professional artwork, photography work, graphic designer work, etc is to add a EXIF tag or several to all your graphical art work. There might be several tools available, I will describe the procedure with the best tool I know for individual and batch processing of EXIF tags - exiftool.

First you install exiftool on your server and/or desktop environment

Beware that changing exif data also changes file size - hence if you do the exif tag processing online on your server, which of course may be faster, your next synchronization between the original offline files with the online published version may overwrite all modified images and graphic files again and thus make your added exif tags lost.

Processing exif tags using exiftool will by default create a new image file and same the original - a jpg file processing for example would result in 2 files of same content:

1. The new processed exif-modified file xyz.jpg
2. A copy of your original now renamed: xyz.jpg_original. keep that original for later evidence purpose for the next several years. Sooner or later there may be a class action lawsuit to protect the right of all the professional private content and artwork creator and you may be ask to provide any and all hard evidence of your original work, the copies published early as well as the copies with new exif tags.

To add your own exif tag-data to your images, with exiftool installed do the following:

cd to directory of images to be batch processed, then execute one by one the 3 lines below in your command line ( bash ):

exiftool -copyright='your name here and your website-URL also goes here if you have a web site' *.jpg

exiftool -imagedescription='image description - a few words similar as alt tag' *.jpg

exiftool -comment='Photographer and Copyright and website again as above' *.jpg

The additional comment tag should contain all above 1 and 2 in case that some modified files lose exif tags or have files NOT updated due to errors in exif processing due to offset of exif data during earlier image processing. Even if exif data damaged in earlier processing - the comment tag usually always works but also normally can only be seen by professional tools and may remain invisible in regular user-level image viewer tools.

To verify all exif data in a file - see instructions of your professional tool. Copyright thieves may be too lazy and too stingy to learn how to do quality professional work and to learn about all details of exif data - copyright criminals may simply steal and republish the laziest and fastest way for easy advertisement revenue. You however as a honest and hard workign professional photographer or graphic artist will know how to do things correctly and a potential class action lawsuit - lawyer also may have the expertise needed to know what is necessary to defend the masses ( may be millions of honest and hard working graphic artists creating original content ... The current annual damage done to the freelance graphic artwork/photography creators around the globe may very easily be in the many hundreds of Millions to Billions of US$ in loss of honest revenue due to copyright infringement by social network sites, blogger sites and MFA sites.

Protect your work by marking your own products. Later when your own revenue shrinks to the ever expanding number of MFA sites built entirely or mostly with stolen content - you may need as much evidence for your own protection as possible. The more you have, the faster a site using stolen content may be shut down. Honest and serious oriented web hosts normally may shut down illegal content publishers within less than 24 hrs. Large companies like Google or MSN usually behave like virgins and delay as much as possible, because every day more may bring them up to millions of US$ additional advertising revenue ... from artwork stolen by criminals, published on made for advertisement ( MFA ) sites showing ads by any of the major ad networks. The joint global revenue of all ad networks is in the Billions of us$ per year, a solid percentage of all that fortune is derived from MFA sites being partially, substantially or entirely build with stolen content and stolen graphic art work. Most of the time by simple use of fully automated scripts that steal graphic art work / photography work and republish in CMS systems on their ad revenue bringing $ fountain - sites.

True love is to produce on your own all the content needed to honestly earn your living and support your own family from your own self created content. You may use tools produced and given away by the Open Source community - but the actual content always should be unique and self created. Unique content is what keeps the Internet alive and challenging for viewers / users as well as for creative content producers. I love to see Millions of desktop users using happily my wallpaper - but I kick ass if a lazy thief earns money at my expense with my hard earned products. Do you truly love ? Test your love and keep the result for you as your feedback.

God bless

hans

Previous posts and follow-up articles on successful web publishing

To read all follow ups and previous articles of the free online web publisher tutorial just read the posts published in the topic category Internet - see top of my blog - to find previous articles around search engine optimization - see category SEO or learn more about Linux server admin and to read more about being successful in general view the topic Love - as love is the key to success in work. Work is nothing else but the expression of love toward a wider audience, or even toward all.

You may also find many useful information, tips and links in my webmaster resource pages