BVM Studios in Dublin Ireland

This morning I discovered that a photographer in Ireland had not only stolen our Web site design, but was also passing our images off as his own. Now, it's bad enough that the design was lifted, but representing himself with someone else's photographs is just wrong.

I was checking out some Google Alerts I have set up and one looked a little strange. It was for a page that's been on our site for a long time, and hasn't changed. I thought it was odd that it just came up so I took a closer look.

It turns out that there's a guy in Dublin, Ireland named Brian Mullowney who really likes our site and how well it comes up on Web searches. Rather than spending years getting his site to rank high, paying a designer to design it, and taking his own pictures, he thought he'd take the easy way and just copy ours. In a way, it's kind of flattering, but still, he was using our work. He copied most of the images and even this blog. From the age of the pages, it looks like it was copied a little over a year ago but was only put online last month.

He did take our logo off and put his BVM Studios logo in its place but many of the links still go to our work.

See some Screenshots: One, two, three, four.

Now, I know most of you know how much photographers, musicians, and other people in the arts hate it when our work is copied. I won't go into the whole "you're taking food off my table" speech because I hate it when people say that. But on the other hand, it is directly stealing. I don't bring it up too much, but I usually know when it happens. Whether or not I do anything about it is another subject. ;-)

In this case, the amount of copying was so absurdly blatant that I had to stop it. His site even had "Squier Photography" on all the price lists and in many of the page titles. I checked out the whois listing to see where his site was hosted. I checked my watch and saw it was the afternoon in Ireland so I called up the Web host and left a message. Surprisingly (because it's Saturday) my call was returned promptly. Once I described what was happening he asked what I wanted to do. All I really wanted was the site to come down, so he took it down.

I tried calling Brian but his phone went unanswered.

I was all set to call the PPA legal team on Tuesday (Monday's a holiday) but I'm glad we were able to take care of it this way.

The moral? Don't Steal! You'll probably be found out and it's never good to be known as someone like that.