Mikele Bicolli
Dec 17, 2021

How do photographers, designers and content creators find out that their images are being used?

Nowadays internet marketing has gained huge importance especially after the pandemic during which the ecommerce begun a rapid growth. One of the best ways to advertise is social media marketing and usage of great photos as well as infographics. The issue is that photography proves to be difficult to many people, after all it’s considered an art. Meanwhile, through a simple internet search you can get access to millions of images that would help you a lot, however most of them are not available for personal and especially commercial use. Copyright owners should grant you permission otherwise using their content is a legal offense.
The issue is that images published on the internet are quite easy to download and use, meanwhile the social medias or other website cannot possibly offer the service of copyright monitoring given the amount of work that would require. Instead, they can take a photo down after the copyright owner reports it and proves the content is not original. But how do the copyright owners monitor if someone is using their content without their consent? Image search tools seem to be their best helpers. There are several engines in the internet now that work in reverse, they require you to input the image and they show the results where the image has been used. These tools gather data from the best search engines which on the other side search billions of pages in less than a second. This data is checked with the image you just uploaded and you will be able to see results of similar and exact copies of your work along with the corresponding link. All you have to do next is to evaluate your options and remedies in order to let the other party know they are infringing your rights. If the infringement is severe enough you may even seek legal help to know how to proceed further.