How legal is this?

A parts business is using my car on its site. I have already asked them to remove it once, and they did. Now its back up.

How do I get them to stop, or at least to pay me for it?

Lawyer is NOT an option.

This is it

http://www.andysautosport.com/suzuki/1990_1994_swift/

Actually, lawyer is the only option.

You could inform GM that they are using their designs in their website, but GM may not take action.

Getting recourse will require international lawyers as your car is in Canada and the offender is in California, add that your car was published on an internet site multiple times for free and you have an issue of selectively requiring payment for use of your vehicles likeness.

A cease and desist order will be your only hope.

The pic was lifted from my own commercial site.

Send his site address to all the Spammers.

But unless the images are blocked from being copied they are public domain. It is one of the reasons everyone puts those logos/watermarks over the images to stop people from grabbing the pic.

Are they just hotlinking to it? or did they copy and paste it?

(hehehe, you know what I am thinking now)...

punch them in the jugular...they will stop

Andy's site said: All content included on this site, such as text, graphics, logos, button icons, and images, is the property of AndysAutoSport.com or its content suppliers and protected by United States and international copyright laws. The compilation of all content on this site is the exclusive property of AndysAutoSport.com and protected by U.S. and international copyright laws. ® 1997-2009 AndysAutoSport.com. All rights reserved.

They are using your image and in effect claiming it is their own unique content. I'd say contact them again, document your communication and let them know that you are prepared to contact your lawyer over the use of your image.

On the internet, getting someone to stop stealing your image (or design, or text, for that matter) is tough to deal with through rational means. If they were rational, they wouldn't do it in the first place, or would take it down immediately when called on it.

So lawyers and such might be helpful, but public shame seems to be more effective.

If they're stupid enough to actually call the image from your server the answer is stupid. Replace that image with another, less friendly one with the same file name, in the same location on the server. This less-friendly image might be something as simple as an image that reads "ANDYS AUTO SPORT SUPPORTS THEFT", or something uglier, like... well, let your imagination go. Guaranteed they'll take it down pronto.

If they actually copied the image over to their own server, you have to take more indirect methods. Still, public shaming works. Besides plastering it all over every place I could think of (twitter, facebook, maybe cardomain, flickr, where ever), I would build a page that's highly optimized for the keywords Andy's Auto Sport and Sprint and put the whole thing on there. Actually, I'd do both, and make sure all my posts linked to the page, to juice Google.

I bet pretty quickly they would take down the image in exchange for you taking down the page, especially if you optimized it well and it's showing up in the Google results for their key terms.

Just don't say anything libelous. Stick to the truth.

The Brown Stig wrote: But unless the images are blocked from being copied they are public domain. It is one of the reasons everyone puts those logos/watermarks over the images to stop people from grabbing the pic.

Uh what? I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure that unless specified, anything you create and put on a site that you host belongs to YOU where copyright is concerned. The watermarks and cheap JS tricks are just there to make things a little more difficult. I'm pretty sure he has a case here, but it's not worth the effort for a lawsuit.

Oh and +1 for public shaming. May I recommend Jalopnik?

While posting photos on your own site may not give others the right to use them, if you host photos to other sites you may have agreed at some point to the Creative Commons License.

Even if you didn't post the photo to a site like Flicker, but someone else did, the site that is now using it may have a reason to believe that the photo was legitimately placed given Creative Commons License.

If you can find a lawyer who you can hand the case off to on a contingency basis (not on a retainer), then by all means hand it off and hope you get something back. If you can't do that, it's probably not worth your time.

I'm pretty sure Creative Commons is not a viral license. You explicitly opt-in. Irrelevant, though. There's no license involved here, just unauthorized use of an image.

Why not just ask for free parts in return for use of your pic? Less messy, you get soething out of the deal, they avoid the inevitable crap you will send thier way.

Tim Baxter wrote: I'm pretty sure Creative Commons is not a viral license. You explicitly opt-in.

Correct, CC is definitely not viral, the only "viral" licenses I know of are the GPLs - and then only under certain circumstances (not that they apply to images anyways).

If you scroll to the bottom of their page they have a disclaimer claiming all images etc are their property and copyrighted. ironic?? So they are saying the image is theirs, so they could possibly go after you for using the image.

You should call them. :) Record the call, and the response. Then post to Jalopnik and/or Consumerist.

Great answers, thanks. I already did call them, and they pulled it. Now its back up again.

I like the public shaming ideas.

One of our competitors pulled a picture off the internet to use in one of their print ads. Turns out the car was mine. We all got a pretty good laugh out of it, and they never ran that ad again or used that particular designer.

Published photos, whether by print or electronic means, are not necessarily public domain.

Go to the place and ask to use the bathroom , turn off water in toilet and flush , then lay a steamer in the the top water canister , its called a dry dock . Also bring some uncooked shrimp and put them in the ceiling tiles .

Remind me not to piss off Karl La Follette.

Oh, a dry dock? A slight variation of the Upper Decker.

Karl La Follette wrote: Go to the place and ask to use the bathroom , turn off water in toilet and flush , then lay a steamer in the the top water canister , its called a dry dock .

wow, at 46 years of age, I learned something today.

my luck is I would slip and fall as I attempt to place the "uh-hum" "product" into the water tank.

Start the same topic on TeamSwift.

Karl, I'm sensing a theme to your methods of revenge. You brought up something similar in the thread about the poor guy who got his nice tool box rammed by a forklift at work.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Suprf1y: If a call doesn't work again, get a lawyer. Public shaming is always an option, of course, but I'm willing to bet that a firmly worded letter on an attorney's letterhead would see this whole thing end for good.

You may complicate things for yourself if you post slanderous or libelous content about the offending shop, and 'public shaming' might be interpreted as such. I ain't sayin' that's right, just the way it might be construed in court.

One of my ex gf's bought some stuff from Andy's AutoSport. We had soo many problems with them. Check out the BBB when you get a chance and look them up.