I just received an email from reader Melissa about a petition regarding the popular image-sharing site PhotoBucket.
This is what she said:
As you might know Photobucket.com is one of the biggest image hosting services online. What many Photobucket users are not aware of is that any image in a public Photobucket gallery is available as a print through Photobucket’s partner site Qoop. Unfortunately art theft is common, and many people find images they like online and then post them to their Photobucket accounts, after which those images are then available to be printed.
Jonathan Bailey of PlagiarismToday.com has joined forces with many internet artists to create a petition asking Photobucket’s owners and administrators to revise their policies to help protect artist’s rights. They are asking that the print service be changed so that only album owners can print their own images, and that they utilize an existing form of copyright protection that uses digital “fingerprints” of image files that have been reported to prevent repeat uploads of infringed artwork.
I have never used PhotoBucket before, so I did a little investigating of my own. I was surprised by what I saw.
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