Thieving and mer spam accounts on social media -- what can be done?

[Ransom]

While I'm not famous enough to have my pics stolen, it's still mighty irritating seeing mers' pictures stolen and used without credit to promote someone else's business.

Reporting them feels like playing Whack a Mole with a non-functioning hammer. Do it and the account might or might not get penalised, but the person can just start another.

What has the community done in response -- ignoring, reporting, naming and shaming, or something else? Would love to hear your thoughts and advice.

[AniaR]

we've been wondering this since the start of the community sadly.

[Mermaid Fenicia]

watermark your pic visible and on a place when cut, will miss a big piece of the tail ;)

[Ransom]

watermark your pic visible and on a place when cut, will miss a big piece of the tail ;)That sometimes works, but the thieves may not care. They're counting on their customers not knowing or caring :(

[fabianfrz]

I don't know what the exact subject is but you can do watermarks in bulk (I made a german tutorial here - The upper part is designing the watermark in GIMP while the command at the bottom shows how to inject the watermark in an image: https://fabian-franz.eu/images/2018/05/08/watermarking-images.html) (https://fabian-franz.eu/images/2018/05/08/watermarking-images.html)

Example output can be seen here: https://fabian-franz.eu/diving/2018/05/01/egypt.html

An alternative to a visible watermark is adding a "Copyright" property in the EXIF data (or similar header) which is also easy to remove but if it is just copied, the copy may also include the property so the copyright infringement has some more evidence when it comes to court.

There are also some techniques you can use if you want to prevent download from your own site but you probably cannot do on most shared hosting providers and images are always easy to download because:

If you want to prevent using right click -> there is a browser setting to prevent disabling it, also disabling JS may kill this prevention
Some element hides the image behind so right click save does not work -> download via the "i" icon still works, the element can be removed by an ad blocker
Use it as an CSS background image -> browsers already offer an download (worked some years ago)

The only thing you can do is suing the person behind the account because if an account is blocked, it is easy to start a new one (maybe on a different social network, forum etc.) and the whole thing will start again.

[MerFaire]

It's not limited to mermaids. If you look at cosplay stuff, there are tons of accounts that are just reposting other peoples pictures. Many times without attribution.