What can you do if a brand is using your images on Instagram?

Featured Photo: Jakob Owens

Problem is, brands also love an audience, and Instagram has become an incredibly popular advertising platform. It’s even owned by Facebook. Running a successful Instagram account means frequent posting, and without widespread knowledge of copyright law, and limited legitimate avenues for sourcing original content, this can mean unauthorized use of images.

So, if you spot a piece of your work on a brand’s account, and you haven’t approved it, what are your options?

Please note that submitting a report of intellectual property infringement is a serious matter with legal consequences. Intentionally submitting misleading or otherwise fraudulent reports of infringement may lead to termination of accounts as well as liability for damages under section 512(f) of the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) or similar laws in other countries.

2. You can go after each brand yourself.

If you have a lot of patience, a lot of free time, and a fairly thick skin, this is a good option. If you’re going to pursue this option, before you begin, make sure you know what you want. Do you want money? Do you want them to take the post down? Remember that people have already seen it by the time you’re alerted to what’s happened, so it’s already done a marketing job for the brand.

When you ask for money, don’t mess around. Know what you want them to pay you, and how you want to be paid. You may not get the opportunity to send a formal invoice, so be prepared to ask for money through a platform like PayPal or Venmo, so that you can send them a link.

Bear in mind that if the company doesn’t comply with your terms, or stump up your fee, you may have a harder time getting compensation if you end up escalating through legal channels, like Pixsy.

Here’s what happened when one photographer took a brand to task:

3. You can chalk it up to ‘exposure’ and move on.

It might not be a surprise to learn that this isn’t an approach that we feel very happy about. As a company who fight for the rights of photographers, we know how hard you work to build a career in photography, and we know the value that that photographers bring to brands. Our mission is to help photographers get the fees that they deserve. And no-one who has created work which is good enough for a brand to want to use deserves to be paid in exposure, aka not paid.

4. We can help.

Whether you’re an amateur or a professional photographer, we can help you to keep your images safe. Once you sign up for a Pixsy account (free for everyone except very high volume users), we’ll import your images and our reverse search engine will check for online matches. You can then review these, and make sure that you’ve authorized each usage of your images.

Our users tell us that this part of the process seems pretty magical, but we think that the real magic happens when you find an unauthorized use of one of your images. You can flag each instance in our system, and we’ll act on your behalf, or use our automatic ‘takedown’ service to send a notice to the site owner.

Sound like a satisfying way to deal with image thieves? We thought so.

Related posts:

If you tried to describe someone you know with three words and come up with “nice,” “funny,” and “smart” you either don’t know well or have simply have no facility with language. Yet, when it comes…

Hey there! I got myself with that task at work where I had to create an image with MongoDB and then run it with Mongo Express so I’ll describe here how we solved it and will try to be as clear as…

This is my new IronStudios 1/10 art scale statue photographed in my home studio. Here’s the behind the scenes look. I used the Impact Photo Pro LED Booth 400 — https://bhpho.to/3NTpLxQ as my base. I…