A few weeks ago, I joined a Facebook Camera club (Highland Photographers) comprised of members mainly from my neck of the woods. It's a great wee group and many have gone on outings together and I am going on one this month. Like here, it's a place to upload your pictures, give and receive critique/praise and also competitions.
Recently though, one member discovered that one of their images was stolen and posted on another group page set up for folks to post stories and pictures of Inverness from days gone by. The stolen image was simply edited by way of converted to mono and an orange filter added. The "thief" posted it up as their own work and claimed all the praise for it!
Upon being confronted about this and told about being in breach of copyright, all the other members of this group instead of ousting the thief, defended him and "set upon" the photographer from our group. They couldn't/didn't accept what the person had done was wrong. I think even one said "anything posted on the internet is fair game". This all then descended into chaos, even the so-called Admin didn't want to know and had much the same attitude as a certain faction of it's members.
It was then discovered that the thief had dozens of stolen images in his "portfolio"....and when confronted with this again, by way of the original photographer posting one of the stolen images on that group page as evidence, the same reaction was met. In fact the thief was so outraged by the fact we found him out, he actually threatened to hunt down the original photographer and his "gang of followers", ie me and the fellow photographers backing him up and I quote, "murder us one by one over the next few days", if we don't "get off his back".
Needless to say, this threat was reported and recorded. An apology was posted by this person the next day, but at the time it was very intimidating. They no longer have an active Facebook account. All known photographers, however, myself included have been banned from the group which harboured this image thief. Yet another kick in the teeth for photographers by an ignorant few.
It's a shame, but an all too common theme arising within Social Media.