Anyone seen this?

[Seolta]

A friend sent this link (http://mag.awn.com/index.php?ltype=pageone&article_no=3605&page=1), thought it might be a good idea to pass it along.

Edit: Have dug up more information (http://judiciary.house.gov/media/pdfs/printers/109th/26410.pdf) making it seem more like a false alarm...

[Sehson]

yea, this is sort of old news.

It has come up several times in the past in other venues for me (being a photographer) with people stealing works for use as public avatars/icons without permission or claiming to be the person of the picture.

This can be exasperated as the original source of the work is confounded as it is copied and moved around the internet, oft being renamed or having identifying tags/marks/texts removed from deliberate or accidental modification.

This is further complicated when the work has made it to servers that exist in areas that do not honor or even respect international copyright laws.

The companies that are poping up as copyright warehouses are making money because they claim they will protect the interests of those that register through them by persuing illegal use of works and shutting down sites that promote such activity. when in reality they can't do more then provide additional backup for a claim as to when something was copyrighted. The age old mail the work to yourself has been worthless for a couple of decades now....

Best bet is realise that if it's good somebody will steal your work, You can only protect it by either being rich, or hacking up your own work.