Who is stealing my pictures and why does it matter?

I have found that many people, especially a lot of the people using the pictures, don’t really understand the harm and don’t understand the need for enforcement. The irony of this reality is that they really do understand the value of using the pictures. For starters, anybody that has put more than ten auctions on eBay and made any effort to learn how to do it right knows that a picture is worth a thousand words as well as more sales and higher prices. It is just a fact, corporations like Sears and Wal-Mart spend millions on advertising including creating professional images, whether pictures, drawings or video. For starters, if some guy buying out a clearance rack in a city where the widgets didn’t fare so well uses the pictures on eBay, the advantage of the company’s dollars spent on the graphics is diluted. Their ads look like every seller’s auctions. But there are other reasons as well.
One of the biggest of these reasons to use the company’s pictures is to mask counterfeits. It has been my experience that a significant percentage of the volume sellers on eBay that use the “stock” photos, are not actually selling the pictured product. If buying a Thompson Chair (made up name) which is made of solid oak, masterfully formed and richly stained from an auction with a stock photo, you may find yourself in possession of a Townsend Chair, made of cheap pine and painted with a wood colored paint. It may even be oak but made cheaply and not nearly as sturdy. You name the product, cell phone batteries (severe problems with exploding counterfeits), the latest toy craze, clothing, designer items, etc. and counterfeits are being sold on eBay with stock photos. Some of these companies monitor their products, others do not.
If you manufacture or market a product and have never done so, just log on to eBay and type in the names of your products. If your products are popular at all, there is likely a lot of auctions. Even adding to it, notice how many auctions list dozens and sometimes more units available. Chances are if there are lots of these, there are lots of counterfeits and stolen/fraud related units. If you are not monitoring, the picture use is like to be close to universal. A well monitored product is usually filled with pictures obviously taken in somebody’s garage or living room. A byproduct of the monitoring is a knowledge born of experience which tells you which are counterfeits and which may be stolen. Once you have this knowledge, you can start hunting down the holes and plugging them, because it is your profits that are flowing out on that screen. While constant monitoring can seem costly, when you run the numbers on what you may be losing, the cost of not doing it is even greater.