 A couple of weeks ago when I was creating a video about how much I'd made selling my photos on Shutterstock, I came across this. These photos look a little too similar. And then I went and looked at other photos and I found other similar images. I found multiple people had downloaded my photos from other sites and then uploaded them to Shutterstock to be sold. And after doing some Google searches, I found that this has been happening for a long time to the point where it's actually pretty common. And Shutterstock has done very little to deter from happening. All right, in this video, I'm going to show you how to see if people have stolen your photos and are selling them on Shutterstock. Talk about why Shutterstock is doing very little to stop them from doing this. And then lastly, talk about how you can get your photos removed from Shutterstock if this happens to you. Now, before I go any further, you probably don't like people stealing your photos and selling them on Shutterstock. But that doesn't mean you should go ahead and dislike this video. If anything, you should go ahead and like this video because what we really need to do is spread the word and get more people to be checking and seeing if their photos have been uploaded to Shutterstock. And then sending Shutterstock DMCA takedown notices. Now, if you don't know what a DMCA takedown notice is, don't worry about that. We'll be talking about it more later in the video. I'm actually going to show you how to send one. But first, let me show you how you can go in and figure out if people have uploaded your photos to Shutterstock and if Shutterstock's selling them. Now, if you're a Shutterstock contributor like me, it's pretty easy. You just go to the photo and you can actually look at the similar photos and see if they're your photos. Now, if you're not a contributor, you can also see if your photos have been uploaded by using the reverse image search on Shutterstock. Just go to Shutterstock.com, click on the little camera icon and then upload your image. And then Shutterstock will show you similar images. And if someone else has uploaded your photo, then you'll see it as a similar image. This is actually a photo that I tried to upload to Shutterstock, but it got rejected. But then someone else went in, made some minor corrections or reversed it, uploaded it and they accepted it and now it's being sold on Shutterstock. So it's easy to check if your photos are being sold on Shutterstock, but it isn't quick. I have over 600 photos that I've uploaded online and you need to go through and check each of them individually. But I went through and did it. I checked all 600 and it took me about a half an hour. Now, I found my photos uploaded to Shutterstock 13 times. And I'm just one photographer. Think about it, there's 1.5 million photos are uploaded to Shutterstock every week. How many of those do you think are just these going on the internet, downloading other people's photos and then uploading them to Shutterstock? Now, I'm pretty easy going when it comes to allowing people to use my photos. If someone wants to use my photos for personal use, I'm okay with that. I do sell my photos on stock sites as well on my website, but if someone were to take one of my photos and use it on a blog, I would never go after them. And I do get emails now and then of people telling me, oh, I found someone else is using their photos or someone has stolen your photos. And I don't let it bother me and I never do anything about it. However, it does kind of irk me that people are taking my photos and selling them on Shutterstock. Probably because I have been selling my photos on Shutterstock for a number of years and I like Shutterstock. Shutterstock has sent me thousands of dollars in licensing fees. So it kind of bothers me that they're being so lenient and letting other people also upload my photos and sell them. Now, I think the most infuriating thing about this is how easy it would be for Shutterstock to stop this from happening. Like they have the technology. We literally are using their technology to figure out if someone else has uploaded our photos. Now, obviously they created a similar image search to help buyers find their photos and have the suggested photos to help the buyers. But there's no reason they can't repurpose that technology to help fight copyright infringement. Now, I'm an amateur photographer, but I'm a professional software developer. And if I had access to Shutterstock's similar photos algorithm, I could develop a tool to detect duplicate photos on Shutterstock in about two weeks. It just isn't that hard given the technology that they already have. Now, I did contact Shutterstock about two weeks ago to request access to their similar photo search algorithm. And I haven't heard back from them. But if they do give me access, I will go ahead and I'll build a free tool for anybody to use to make it even easier to see if someone else is uploading your photos to Shutterstock. Not only that, but after I write it, I will give the code away for free. I'll make it open source, put it on the web. Anybody can use it, including Shutterstock, if they just want to take it and use that same code to help them find copyright infringement. And again, it wouldn't be that hard for me to do. The code would actually be very similar to my free Instagram hashtag generator tool. And I can probably reuse half the code from that site to be able to build this tool. So make sure you hit the like button down below and maybe more and more people will see this to the point where someone at Shutterstock will see it and take me up on my offer. Anyways, enough on that. Now, once you've found that someone has stolen your photos and uploaded them to Shutterstock, you need to send a DMCA takedown notice to Shutterstock. Now, DMCA stands for Digital Millennial Copyright Act and it's a law in the United States that protects service providers like Shutterstock when users upload copyrighted material. However, in exchange for this protection, they have to remove that copyrighted material very quickly after they've been notified. Now, the DMCA takedown notice does need to contain some legalese around the fact that you own the copyright and that you're not lying. So what I'll do is I'll put a link down below to the template that I use. And if you're following along at home, you can just basically go cut and paste that template out and just insert the links to your own images. So now I'm just gonna send this to infringementclaims at Shutterstock.com. And I did do this before and I received a response saying the photos had been taken down two or three days later. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do another video once I receive that response. One of the things I wanna check this time, which I didn't check last time, is when they just removed the photos or whether they actually banned the people who uploaded the photos. Because some of the people who uploaded my photos have hundreds of photos on there, probably from other people. So my hope is that Shutterstock is going and banning these people but I really wanna check that afterwards. So if you're interested in seeing what happens, make sure you subscribe to the channel and turn the notifications on and then you'll get notified when I upload that video. Now, if you search the Shutterstock community for infringement claims, you'll get 148 results, some dating back to 2011. And a lot of them are actually Shutterstock employees going and telling people to email infringementclaims at Shutterstock.com for a DMCA takedown notice. So it isn't news to Shutterstock all that this is happening. So it would be easy to start hating on Shutterstock for allowing people to do this. But Shutterstock is a company made up of people and I guarantee you there are some people at Shutterstock who would love to implement the tools and processes needed to stop this copyright infringement from happening. But I also guarantee you that there's people at Shutterstock that are looking at it purely as from a financial point of view and they don't think that the investment of those tools and processes justified. That's just the way it is at every single company. So you need to understand, Shutterstock is a public company and public companies exist to make money. So the only way that this problem is gonna get solved is if it's in Shutterstock's best financial interest to put in the tools and processes to deter these copyright thieves. So rather than typing a hateful comment below this video and moving on, why don't you spend 10 minutes, find some of your best photos that you've uploaded to the web and go and see if somebody else has uploaded them to Shutterstock. And if they have, send Shutterstock a DMCA takedown notice. See, doing this will actually make a difference because Shutterstock needs to pay people to deal with these DMC takedown notices. And there must be like a magic number where if they start getting so many DMCA takedown notices that their costs will keep going higher and higher to deal with them, that it will just make financial sense for them to invest in the processes and tools to stop people from uploading copyright infringement rather than dealing with it on the back end with the DMCA takedown notices. So by going in and seeing if your photos have been uploaded to Shutterstock and sending that notice, you're actually helping solve the problem much more so than just writing a nasty comment down below. Now, if you did go and check if any of your photos are in Shutterstock and whether you found them or not, I would love to hear about it in the comments. Now, I'll be posting follow up videos on this topic. So make sure you go down and subscribe to the channel as well as hit the notifications so you don't miss any of them. Thanks so much for watching.