Unpopular opinion: that "just add a watermark" advice for stolen photos is mostly useless | Copyright Cop Shop - Freelance Forum - The Community for Independent Professionals
Unpopular opinion: that "just add a watermark" advice for stolen photos is mostly useless
A designer friend in Denver told me last spring that slapping a watermark on my portfolio shots would keep randos from stealing them, so I did it for like 2 weeks. Then I found one of my photos on a bakery's site with the watermark cropped right out, and the owner basically laughed at my email. So what actually works when someone just crops the mark off, do you send a takedown anyway or is it a lost cause?
My cousin went through something like this with her pottery pics. Someone lifted a whole set of her glazed mugs off her Etsy page and put them on a dropship site, she spent a month emailing and got nothing but crickets. Then her sister, who is a paralegal, told her to file a DMCA with the host instead of the thief. Site went dark in like 4 days. The bakery thing is rough cause small shops know they can just ignore you. Filing through the host seems to scare people way more than a personal email ever does.