Fire Engines Photos

Lets hope someone from Northamptonshire can take another picture of this somewhat unusual appliance when it goes on-the-run without spoiling such
a nice picture with their name so brilliantly splattered all over it.
Most of us do appreciate the copyright of peoples pictures, but this was
somewhat well over the top.

Added by Pete Matten on 13 July 2008.

I agree with your comment Pete. The photos on this website are reduced to a level that only can be used on websites. A decent print you can't produce with our resolution. But nevertheless there are people that borrow photos. Not nice, but you can't stop it I think. If Jake wants to sent in another photo with out the text, you can sent it to the editor by email.

Added by Marcel on 13 July 2008.

Oddly enough, my mate bought a fire engine photo CD off of ebay this week, and i think nearly every picture on it was downloaded from your site Marcel.......

Added by Stewart Kaye on 13 July 2008.

You can't stop that kind of things Stewart. But as I said earlier you can only use it on computers. And you always can edit text in a program such as Photoshop.
Stealing from the internet, you can't stop it. Do you have a name of this Ebay handler ?

Added by Marcel on 13 July 2008.

I hope none of them were mine

Added by Andy McVean on 13 July 2008.

I had a look on Ebay (UK) this morning and bought one of these CDs. When it comes in I'll have a good look and take the right steps with both Ebay and directly with the seller. I will also ask the company who provides this site (Plexus Media Ltd) to step in .
However if all this is not going to result in anything I will publish all the details and leave it to you guys to vent your opions with them :-)
One additional note: whatever is going to be on this CD, it will not have any of the descriptive text.. which in my opinion makes it hardly worth anything for a dedicated person.

Added by Marcel Gommers - editor on 14 July 2008.

Jake, well at least you fired up some active comment. Regardless of that, you take a good photo mate so keep them coming, , , ,

Added by Pavel on 14 July 2008.

You want to try and put pics of anything else on the net to and watch the buggers pinch them...

i have a photo clan on netlog and it's always happening on there, beware of photo theifs.....

on here, i set my images at 640x480 res, ok for a 6x4 inch print, but would struggle to get a much better sized print.

maybe this site can adopt some type of watermarking system for our pics?

Added by John Johnstone on 14 July 2008.

I also bought one of those CD's and contacted both the seller and e-bay to no avail. Had to laugh as some of my own photos were on the CD including one of me next to our Scania 93 at South Queensferry. The seller wasn't interested when I emailed him.

Added by Stevie Murray on 14 July 2008.

Jake, great photo. I should have mentioned that first of course!
I hope that the seller and Ebay will be a bit more impressed if a company puts it all in writing rather than just individuals. Note that I already have the name and address of the seller, might pay him a visit, though it is quite a few miles away. Or might use the web to highlight / publicise this person's activities....

I like the suggestion of watermarking, though I am sure that that will just be ignored and not deter anyone. Will ask the programmer to look into it.
We keep the size of photos low too for this reason. At normal print quality of 300dpi the photos will only be a little over 2 inch wide. Useless if you ask me....

Added by Marcel Gommers - editor on 14 July 2008.

Hi Marcel, I think your course of action is the right one. This is by far the best fire website on the web. Apart from your own hard work, it is the contribution of enthusiasts sending pictures in. Hopefully they won't be put off by "toerags" illegally using their images. Chasing this individual will hopefully deter others. Well done Marcel!

Added by Stewart Kaye on 14 July 2008.

Well I started something here, didn't I.All I can really say is that if this copying of our material is being re-copied for gain by an individual or some organisation, then somehow its got to be stopped.We share our pictures because we all have the same interest, the fire service and its fire appliances-its history of days gone by, and for many, todays fire services and appliances.I do hope that the odd few looking at our website will not concider copying our pictures for gain without asking first, be honest, we're only an E.Mail away.

Added by Added by Pete Matten on 14 July 2008.

Yep, I agree with you all. Not only we should pity the editor but we also should pity to the contributors/photographers who tried hard and try their best to be part of the website. Anywhere, I also saw the detail about the CD which titled as 3000+ photo of fire engines (if i not mistaken) at Ebay(UK) and it still sold today at the site.

Added by Bomba Boy on 15 July 2008.

May I ad my tuppence. Several of my photographs have appeared in other folks possession over the last few months. There is a way of disabling the right click on photographs on the web but I don't know how. Plagiarism is rife i'm affraid so Jake, carry on untill we find a way of stopping the purge on the sites. At the end of the day it's theft and the definition of theft from my days in North Wales Police is "To dishonestly appropriate property belonging to others with the intention to permanently deprive"

Added by Andrew Middleton on 12 October 2010.

No you have not started anything on here Pete, ask Marcel I have emailed him with the very same, problem, and we have come to a solution to our images on here with Marcel. Afraid the right hand click wont work either as you can download the webpage and get it off there. We have tried wraps and everything, we think a very faint grey watermark is good enough. Our images have appear elsewhere as well, we all love fire-engines, and that's why we put them on here, so to be honest I think that Jake is only protecting his interest, the same as we do ours. I am contacting ebay immediately to see, if they will take any notice of a company complaint.
To all our contributors on this section, keep sending them in, it would be a rather boring day without new images to look at, and Marcel and Marcel, you do a brilliant service here keep it up.

Added by Mike & Helen on 13 October 2010.

Mike & Helen, thank you for your kind words, really much appreciated! And I fully agree with your comment.

Andrew, there are so many ways of circumventing a 'disabled right click', all of them relatively easy to do. It would not add anything to the protection of your photo, but would disable functionality for visitors (such as opening a link in a new tab / window, which I use all the time).

I have had another look recently at the 'protection' other sites try to implement (like the biggest of them all Fl***r) and so far I have been able to get around all of them easily . The long and short of it is that as soon as I can see something on my screen, I am able to copy it. It is the way the internet / browsing works.

We've been asked in the past why we stick to our limit in photo size of 735 pixels wide. The most important reason is that we feel that it is big enough for people to enjoy the pictures, but it is too small to be really useful. You can't make a decent print of it (so that rules out real / professional commercial use) and I would not buy photos on eBay that are of that low quality / small size. Sure there will always be people who cheat, and as long as people buy these low grade copies others will try to make some pennies of it.

So all in all, I agree completely with Mike that a faint watermark (your watermark) at this moment might be the best option.
There are many software tools out there that will do that for you. Add your name and the copyright logo, choose a faint colour / font and position in such a way that it does not obstruct the subject... like Mike & Helen's picture 25526. It might discourage abuse, it makes sure that if someone buys a photo he / she is aware that copyright has been abused and when you do come across a photo elsewhere you can easily prove it is yours.

Added by Marcel Gommers on 13 October 2010.

Marcel,
I think if this website was more widely known then there wouldn't be much of a market for CD's of pirated pictures from it. Maybe if you advertised it on E-Bay (and Amazon) you could benefit in more ways than one, for instance by raising the awareness of the site amongst enthusiasts looking for pics in the same place as the pirates trying to sell far less than what this site can provide for free. Perhaps it might also raise the awareness of the pirates of the very same thing, that what they are trying to do is a bit pointless and hopefully convincing them that they may as well give up. The other thing is that it would save all the hassle of trying to contact the pirate, getting them to stop what they are doing etc.
Hope you don't mind me airing my views
Cheers

Added by Roger Mason on 14 October 2010.

Suggestions and views are always welcome though I would not like this discussion to distract too much from the topic of the site itself.
I've replied to Roger by email and would suggest that if others have suggestions too they can email me or Marcel Sloover directly (click on blue name below)

Cheers
Marcel G.

Added by Marcel Gommers on 15 October 2010.

Please add your comments about this picture using the form below.

Comments

Your Name

Your email address - this will be shown on the page and will allow the system to notify you of further comments added to this picture.