When I posted the essay about the Nevada Shoe Tree in

A few days ago, I noticed a huge jump in the bandwidth on my photo subdomain, to the tune of 33,000 hits and 3+ GB. Upon checking out the referrer report, I quickly deduced that the


Again, this sort of thing doesn't bother me. They are beautiful and unique photographs and I have no problem sharing them if people find them interesting or pleasureable to view.
Photo Gallery album
I hadn't Googled "Nevada Shoe Tree" in a while, so I thought I'd give it a quick look-over and see if they were being linked anywhere new and interesting other than these Brazilian forums. Imagine my dismay when I discovered this on the first page of links. Of the 8 photos being used for this "Funny Picture", SIX OF THEM ARE MINE. According to the voting page it's on, it was posted to the site on December 8, 2005. In 5 days, it has generated this atrocious, ad-plastered website 38,000 page views. As final insult to injury, the photos are being hosted by the website rather than hotlinked. In short, there is no way that these photos are linked to me, personally, in any way.
While chatting with
I screen-capped the website for good measure then began checking the place out. Site content is submitted by the website's users. Realistically, the website just gathers whatever is submitted to it and makes a broad assumption that the submitter either has rights to the content or that it is within the realm of public domain. I can't really fault the website, however, I do have a right to credit/compensation or to have the photos removed. My next step was to find contact information. Naturally, the Contact link on the website doesn't work. This is typical of websites with somewhat shady practices, so I proceeded to do a Whois lookup and acquired all sorts of phone numbers, email and snail mail addresses.
welfy (1:28:26 AM): ooh!
welfy (1:28:31 AM): *kills Mary Dunne*
welfy (1:29:03 AM): KILL KILL
welfy (1:29:17 AM): IT'S HER
welfy (1:30:11 AM): don't let her sweet apple pie face fool you, Lin!
So I'm going to call some of those phone numbers tomorrow and raise a bit of a stink. My plan is to propose that they purchase rights to the photographs or cease and desist the use of them by the end of the week. If not, they'll hear from a lawyer by the first of next week.