[link]

My (and another fellow photographer's) Fight over stolen photography with a website overseas:

A website that sells belly dance costuming and is based out of Pakistan had saved a couple of our images from online and cropped the watermarks out and used them to decorate their website banners and borders. We had attempted going through the PPA, who proved to be fairly useless after sending a threatening letter didn't work (Nice to know I'm wasting a few hundred dollars a year on their membership-won't make that mistake again) After the guy in Pakistan said he paid someone for the pics that he cannot name for confidentiality and they were his pictures the PPA said they could recommend attorneys to us. (Which I thought was the purpose of them) Anyways, we started sending emails to the guy directly telling him to pull down the shots. At first he insinuated he was in Pakistan and there wasn't anything we could do, but he would buy the pictures from us now. After telling him, no thanks- take them down, he finally did the other day.

I'm not sure whose pictures he has snagged now to use, but I doubt he paid anymore for them than he did ours. The site is silvextribal.com and we have asked dancers to boycott the site, even now because obviously the guy is shady. I've also seen a lot of bad customer service stories about the site on various forums, so there may already be plenty of people boycotting him for other reasons.

A couple of example images posted at the blog. [link]