Enforcing copyrights, at home and abroad

**"* P* L* <l*@hort.net>**

A few weeks ago I started going through my photos with TinEye,
a commercial service that lets you search for copies of your
photos online (up to 50 photos/day can be searched for free).

I found one photo and sent my very first DMCA takedown notice
today (I was loathe to do so, but they didn't respond to
emails and their site said that they only responded to DMCA
notices).  Then I started using Google's image search [1] at

   http://images.google.com/

and found a lot more!

I'm shocked and saddened by the number of images that have been
stolen from the hort.net image gallery, and I'm wondering if
it's worth pursuing.  Some are being used by small Mom & Pop
nurseries, others are in blogs, and yet others are on foreign
sites that copy entire articles with some sort of weird synonym
replacement.

My question is this:  Are these worth pursuing?  If you find
that a photo has been stolen by a nursery, do you pursue it?  I
feel for them, especially in difficult economic times.  Am I
losing revenue because they stole the photo?  I'm not sure.

Then the foreign sites are an even more complicated matter since
US copyright laws don't apply there.  At what point do you just
say, "I give up?"  

I'm curious what the writers and photographers out there think
about this.

Chris
www.hort.net

[1] For those of you unfamiliar with the Google image search, I 
think it works better than TinEye.  Go to http://images.google.com/
and click on the camera icon to the right of the toolbar.  Then
paste in a URL for your photo and it will find any matching
photos on the Internet.
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