Once is funny, when you find it is widespread, I get annoyed.
Jørn, the brewer at Trondhjem Mikrobryggeri, has pointed out that he has found my photo at yet another website. At Mozzarella’s Grill & Bar. It’s one of a number of photos rotating at their front page.
It might be that the restaurant chain, this time located in various locations in Connecticut and Rhode Island, is innocent. But they could have asked for photos actually originating from their own restaurants. And they claim the copyright for their website.
My main suspect is, once again, the company behind the website. This time it is called Zevon Media. According to their own pages, they have social media skills. We’ll see about that.
For the record, here is my photo of the beer samples in Trondheim again. Little did they know they would conquer the globe.
I await a response. This time I will not settle for dimes. I know a beer blogger lawyer.
I had a similar thing with the local Mercedes Benz magazine. They used one of my photos. When I contacted them with a very polite and diplomatic e-mail, they apologised profusely and agreed to pay me. Hope you’ll have the same luck
knutalbert – that came to me as a stock photo from a designer (I no longer work with thankfully) – which apparently it is not. I will remove it immediately and apologize for the use. You can use TinEye to find all offenders. Again, my apologies, it’s never our intention to use without rights. I hope I responded quickly (and demonstrated some social media skills).
You should expect a bill anyway.
Tried reverse image-googling the pictures and there are a lot of hits, all over American craft beer pages. It’s a pretty high hit when you image-google “craft beer” and not even on your own blog anymore. I suppose people see google image search as a sort of public domain source, and I do it myself if I’m looking to make a visual point on Facebook or something. But doing it for a business is just wrong. Good luck trying to find them all 🙂