Seller using my photos and description

[hartymo11]

Peeved..... I sold an item last week successfully, no hassles. Have just noticed the buyer has resisted the said item at a higher price using my photos and description! Cheek of it! I have sent her a polite message..... Can't believe what some people will do to earn $2.

[dags111]

so if the photos are not watermarked its ok to steal them or link to your photohosting site or completely copy your html ?

[lyndal1838]

Not, it is not OK but if they are watermarked it is less likely that anyone would steal them.

It also helps if you tick the box to say that your photos are not to be included in the ebay library of photos as anyone can use them.

[retailtherapist_8]

The prblem with watermarking is it so often hides the view of the item. Unless its off to the bottom right or left. So often I have gone to buy an item and those marks make it hard to determine certain features especially with handbags /jewellery.

Its only happened to me the once so I am not too concerned if it occurs regularly I will have to watermark pics.

[clearancebazaar1]

Happened to me last week, easy to deal with, there is a report item button on each listing, push this one of the options is to report that this person stole your photos or content, this is definately against ebay rules and ebay deals with it swiftly, person who copied mine had their listing removed within 10 minutes and i presume gets a policy violation as well

[888lightning]

Yes.. on my business account... I discovered someone had started selling the same item as me... that's cool, some competition... but the photos looked very familiar...

They were mine.... if it was one my personal (non business) , one off items, I wouldn't care. but ones for my business I do, as I had to take my own photos.

I reported both listings to ebay as copyright.. didn't think anything would happen.

I checked about 3 hours later and both listings had disappeared - can I only guess ebay removed them.

[springyzone]

It's an interesting question.

I would never pinch anyone's photos and text but I had a funny thing happen to me once.

I bought an item-a bit of an unusual item-and it had a bit of a description about it. I googled for further info and actually found the original site the info had been copied from.(and no, it wasn't the seller's)

Down the track I had a couple of my own to sell (under a different ebay name).

I took my own photos, wrote my own text, but down the bottom I added a section called further information-and copied some of the same info she had, but I copied from the site.

I  had this angry, angry email telling me to stop or she would report me to ebay. I never answered and after I sold my items I had no more anyway. But I often wondered how she could report me or make it stand up, as we had both copied from a 3rd site-she had copied much bigger slabs than I had, actually.