If you find a site that contains images to which you own the copyright (and
you've not given them permission to use the images) then send them a polite
email message notifying them that they are using a copyrighted image
(specify which one) and asking them to remove the image within a specific
period of time.
 
Most web pages (or domains) provide email contact information, but if you
can't find a listed email contact, or you get no response from the one
given (or the mail bounces), then you can get the contact information for
the site's domain.
 
Got to Network Solutions' home page (http://www.networksolutions.com) and
perform a search on the offending domain.  The search will yield email
contacts as well as the domain servers, which for most web pages points to
the service provider for the domain, whom you should also contact about the
copyright violation.
 
Be polite in your correspondences about the copyright infringement.  There
is a very good chance that the author of the site with your image did not
actually take the image from your page at all, but found it lurking on a
site with a collection of images for web authors to use.  Ask if this is
the case in your original email message and request the URL from which the
author obtained the image (the root cause).
 
The Oregon Ferret Association has also had (and still has) problems with
other sites using images to which they own the copyright, and each time we
found that our images had been pirated by somebody else and placed in an
online collection for web authors to use.  In fact I'm still trying to hunt
down the site that includes the OFA's primary background image (of dancing
ferrets) in just such a collection (if anyone see's it on anything but OFA
pages, please contact me with the URL).
 
It's hard to find good images to use when you are creating a web page, and
to help out the OFA's web masters have setup a clip art page of ferret
images submitted over the past several years
(URL: http://www.oregon-ferret.org/resources/clipart.html last updated on
4-15-99).  When a new image is submitted and we aren't sure who actually
created it, we check many ferret web pages around the web to see if we can
find it's origin before adding it to our list.  We also provide a contact
on the clip art page for folks to email us if they find an image on the
clip art page that should not be there.
 
Leonard Bottleman       [log in to unmask]
[Posted in FML issue 2652]