Earlier this year Flickr announced a partnership with a web company called Pixsy who operate an online image theft service using AI technology to match your images with others on the net. Out of curiosity I set up one of their limited free accounts and left it to scan the net for matches to my published Flickr images. The results were both interesting and hilarious. The technology is far from 100% accurate and I would guess that the majority of so called matched images were actually not mine but, at best, similar other images. It appears that the AI technology ignores colours and uses other parameters, this results in hundreds of matches for say a particular aircraft type photographed from a specific angle. Sometimes the matches are hilarious but soon grow tiresome and after a while I grew fed up and gave up.
This evening, about 4 months from the last scan, I thought I would take another look for the sake of curiosity. Many hundreds of matches, about half were false and the majority of the remainder were quite harmless with social media platforms/forums linking to an image for one reason or another. You can filter results to only commercial uses and that flagged up a couple of blatant copyright thefts so I've decided to pursue one to see what happens.
This is my original image on Flickr:
Cessna 525 Citation Jet 1 N525FD by Neil D. Brant, on FlickrAnd the copy, thumbnail bottom left.
https://www.privatefly.com/private-jets ... tion.html#
You'll see that the image has been altered with the registration airbrushed out, but otherwise it's a copy.
Pixsy operate a claims service so I've filled out the form and submitted a commercial claim. I don't know what the going rate for image use is, don't really care, but curious as to what will happen.
Of the other images found, most are attached to online discussions and photosharing around the world, all very acceptable as an enthusiast.
I'll let you know what happens.
Neil
