Photo Contribution Stolen on Google Maps

[Briggs]

Generally I keep a comprehensive record of all the photos that I upload. I specifically look out for my top 100 or so photos to just monitor their progress. However, recently it's come to my attention that one of my photos taken on June 17, 2017 was removed from my personal Google Maps contribution and that same photo was discovered on another local guides' contribution instead.

Caption: The offender's photo taken from my contributions, and the photo data from my Google Photos account. It may look like the photo changed owner when they uploaded their photo of food.

This photo, along with Lentils As Anything were both accruing views equally among each other. However when one of them dropped off the contributions list, I didn't think anything suspicious. But upon this discovery, this has now become exceedingly infuriating to know that another Local Guide can take a photo contribution from me and attribute it as their own! The photo now on the listing Golden Lotus Vegan is a lower resolution and slightly cropped upload of my original photo, and no longer appears in my contributions with 600,000 views (from the last time I checked)

I would've thought that finding photos removed from my contributions meant that it was reported or had to be taken down for various reasons. To realise that some of these photos were stolen and attributed to someone else in respect to my copyright that Google enabled the transferral of is ridiculous.

Now I demand answers and a resolve to this issue.

• Remove the photo from the offending user's contributions and return the original image attribution to me and my photo contributions, and
• Restore the amount of views it accrued back to my profile (either by reallocating the photo back to me or restoring the original).

No wonder why sometimes my views fluctuate so randomly. You have no idea how much outrage this is causing. I implore you, restore this at once.

[Briggs]

In addition, when clicking the photo link on the user's contributions page, instead of navigating to the original listing, I am directed to a Google+ photo viewer. This gives me the impression that the photo was taken from Google Maps, re-uploaded in a lower quality in a Google+ album and replaced my original photo on the listing.

Caption: The offending photo reuploaded on June 6, retaining the original name of my image.
Caption: My original photo, same as above but with higher resolution, the original data taken and camera specifications.

Requesting your help @Atsukot or another moderator, for the love of all things, please help me.

[PaulPavlinovich]

While I can certainly see how a Local Guide could pinch one of your images and re-upload it as one of their own I don't see how they could have removed the original image from your contributions. Perhaps there is a bug at play here. @BruceDM what do you think?

[Briggs]

@PaulPavlinovich I agree. My guess is that there might be a bug or something suspicious at play.

From what I can deduce, when this photo was uploaded, it brought a lower-res version of my photo to her contributions. I found a few more photos taken from my personal contributions as well further down the list.

In fact, I'm actually highly suspicious of this Local Guide. Since I first posted about this, the user has uploaded an additional 3,500 photos of places and some of those places stem from New Zealand, New York, Japan, Newcastle and all these different places. The other photo at the Golden Lotus Vegan is a copyrighted photo from Sitchu.

I will file a report with the Local Guides team via email to investigate the Local Guide and situation in question.

[PaulPavlinovich]

Hi @Briggs I know you have this email channel available to you and thank you for making the report and your continued efforts.

For the benefit of other Local Guides without the behind the scenes channel what they need to do in a situation like this is to post to the Feedback and Feature Requests forum with the topic "I need to report a Local Guide please contact me" without any personal details and a Googler will reach out them.

Regards Paul

[Briggs]

For as long as this investigation is underway and my photo is still credited to the "Local Guide", I will cease all heavy contributions on Google Maps and continue to provide evidence that this Local Guide is breaching copyright by uploading photos of intellectual property attributed by other users, other professional photographers and from other blogs such as Broadstreet, Timeout and beyond. This can be easily cross-referenced by taking a glance at the professional photos that obviously stick out from the rest of the poor quality uploads, and then doing a quick Google search of the listing to instantly locate most of the photos by face value.

Shady Pines Saloon - The guide has uploaded photos from the carousel in the link to the listing, to which all the photos are credited to Anna Kucera.

Paramount Coffee Project - All photos were taken from the website, and all are credited to Amanda Michetti.

Milk Bar by Cafe Ish - Some of the photos are clearly watermarked from Simon Food Favourites.

For photos of Bryant Park Grill, The Draper's Arms, Crown Hotel, Joe Black Cafe, Park Hyatt New York and more of the LG's uploads, they are all clearly visible in the linked page, especially found in galleries, photo carousels and slideshows, and many if not all of them are credited to another photographer. This is all a breach of the Maps User Contributed Content Policy, in which contributions:

• must be based on real experiences and information,
• if they are deliberately fake content, copied or stolen photos, off-topic reviews, defamatory language, personal attacks, and unnecessary or incorrect content are all in violation of our policy, and
• if seen must be reported.

I will stop at nothing to ensure that photo taken from me is rightfully returned back to me and that justice is served for this "Local Guide", and if my efforts ultimately remove me from the Local Guides program for conduct issues, then that would be for the best.

I might be irrational and quite brash about this topic, but this is because this hits home. Photos I take great quality of when I upload to Google Maps is vested with love, effort and passion, and when it comes to a point in an amalgamation where my photos are rejected from being made visible to the public by the Google Maps AI, my photos are being stolen by this user, credited for their own and the fact that this person can deliberately take clearly copyrighted photos from other professional, and commissioned photographers without having to do anything, this defeats the pride of the Local Guide.

I'll check back on the investigation every month considering that these investigations can take upwards to over a year, but for the interim I have no reason to contribute as long as this local guide profile breathes and lives on stealing other people's photos.

Your cooperation will be appreciated.

[LucioV]

Hi @Briggs as far as I can see the "user" you reported is no longer a Local Guide, so action has been taken against this account.

Many photos are still in the stream, but we noticed in the past that the removal process could be very long, but is effective.

Sorry for what happened, I hope not to receive this kind of action in the future.

[PintosMom]

Wow! Sorry that happen to you ,Why don't you reach out to the person ,now using your photo and ask them to remove it. I believe that everything we do on the internet becomes property of the internet .So once you post anything it's gone .We no longer own it .We do not pay Google to use their incredible products ever,  that's how I look at it.

I am sure many will not agree with me .I feel that the net is so public ,it's like a a huge library .Free for all of us to enjoy .If you post ,kiss it goodbye .My simple way of looking at things .Sharing great things ,its a real positive .

[Briggs]

I really don't think anyone is taking this seriously. The guide is still sourcing photos from other official websites and other photographers and uploading them to Google Maps. Take a look through their contributions, you will see that the contributions are not consistent with each other.

@PintosMom and how will I reach out to this guide? Do I say that a few of my photos were taken from me without permission? There are no real positives in stolen work. It is being attributed to someone else, my work. There is no kissing of anything, what you create is yours. What would you do if you uploaded a family photo under your name and all of a sudden someone else took it and say that it's their photo they took of you?

[Briggs]

Here is my monthly return to check on the status of this investigation and the Google Maps user in question.

Unfortunately at this time, nothing has been done to stop the extraction of external photos from this user and uploading it to other listings.

When a photo that illustrates Pokemon Go gets uploaded unto Abbotts Hotel (Waterloo) taken from the Daily Telegraph article published two years ago, you can be very sure that they are not from the uploader. I've already done my bit in reporting these photos for copyright, now do yours.

You are not legally authorized to file a copyright complaint on behalf of the copyright owner. In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), we only accept copyright complaints from content owners or someone officially authorized to act on their behalf. If you have legal questions about the DMCA (the text of which can be found at the U.S. Copyright Office Web Site, http://www.copyright.gov), please consult your own legal counsel. We cannot assist you further.

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You've let me down.