A little bit more than a week ago a photo of our Leonberger Bronco taken when he was three months old was stolen and used without attribution. The thief, Valerie, was the founder and administrator of a new Leonberger Facebook group. In addition, she changed his name and gender. Our breeder (well Bronco’s breeder) Julie Schaffert alerted me to the situation. I was unaware of the existence of this group. Julie knows this photo well since I’ve used it a lot on Facebook and Instagram as well as here. I think the worst part of it was that the thief manipulated the emotions of the members of the group by fabricating a story about the puppy being sick. What a dubious way to attract attention.
It is far from the only time I’ve had a dog photo stolen. I was (well still is) a member of a few pug groups and all of them except for one smaller group were photo theft groups. It seemed like the bigger the groups, the worse they were. The founders/administrators of the groups regularly stole the photos posted by the members and then used the Facebook approval feature to prevent the members from complaining about the situation. I had several photos of Daisy stolen.
The photo below was stolen dozens of times and passed around to several groups including groups I was not a member of. I accidentally discovered my photos in other pug groups that I was randomly browsing. Her name and gender were often changed, and it was perpetually her birthday for at least several months. She was congratulated thousands of times, which was a silver lining. At first, I played along and just said thank you to all the people congratulating her even though I was not the one who posted the photo. However, that became unsustainable as there were so many congratulations in so many places for so long and then one guy started accusing me of pretending it was my pug. Well, it was my pug. After a while I just gave up on the pug groups. It seemed to be the same problem everywhere.
So why do people steal dog photos? It seems like in some cases it is for the purpose of selling stuff, but that is not always the case. It seems like some photo thieves just want to grow their groups and become “influencers”. I should say that one of my old on-line friends told me that he had a popular YouTube video downloaded and re-uploaded (stolen) several times. He was making money off that video so in that case it was a matter of theft of money. YouTube took down those videos when he reported them, but naturally he still lost some money.
This seems to be a problem that’s spreading like wildfire on social media. I did not use to see this, but now I see it all the time. Photo theft happens even in the beer groups I help administer. Apparently taking your own photo of a beer can is too much to ask for. Unfortunately, it seems like photo theft has become normalized behavior.
Leonberger Life 