Update : After reporting the matter to Instagram, my copyright claim was accepted and the stolen photo was removed from the service. I hope all other affected photographers did the same and reported this user for copyright violations.

I said I hate this topic, but the story evolved from yesterday, so I thought I will post an update.

So looks like the person who used my photo (and other photos from other photographer) without permission, without credit and was quite a jerk about it by deleting comments and changing his Instagram account to private, is a more widely know person in Croatia. So once more photographers started to complain, the local news sites in Croatia picked up the story and published articles about it.

So I have been bombarded by questions, comments and really nice messages from Croatian people who are really disgusted by how he behaves. But here are few answers.

No, I don’t plan to sue him. Not worth it, to spend the time and effort on such a person. I still plan to submit a copyright claim, but not sure how to, as he changed his account to private, and so I can’t link to the offending photo. I think the news coverage will be punishment enough.

I hope he learns his lesson and stops profiting from other peoples work. But since that will probably take a while, and right now he still claims that he is the author of all the photos, here is an undeniable proof that I’m the author, which he can look at while doing such claims :) (sorry for the huge watermarks, I don’t want to give him anything to work with)

So first, my final photo and “his” edit.

Screen-shot of the original RAW image:

And a screen-shot from the photo series, I took that evening:

And for those curious, who also speak Croatian, you can find an article about him here, here and here. Most include examples of other stolen photos by him.