We all know that people who need images for their web sites will often steal them through various search engine image searches and with the threat of the orphan works legislation that is about to come about in the US it seems that it is the duty of the owner of an artwork to be the one responsible for the policing of the use of the artwork. But this is nearly impossible for 99% of the population, so instead Egami Bot is here to search for images that are being used on web sites where they don't belong.
Basically Egami Bot crawls the web searching for images, then simply checks the images EXIF data to see if there is a URL listed in the Copyright field of the image and if that URL matches the site that the image is currently appearing on. If not, the owner of the URL listed in the image's EXIF data is notified of the location that the image was found. (If the owner has registered with Egami Bot)
Egami Bot does not collect or record any data related to your web site unless an image is found with EXIF data that does not match the URL where the image is found. We hope that Webmasters will understand that Egami Bot is harmless and will not block it's visits even if it ignores their robots.txt directives. We are just trying to help artists protect their work.
How Do I Get Egami Bot To Work For Me?All you have to do is sign up which requires no more than a notification email address and any URL that you might tag your images with. Then before you put your images online you need to use Photoshop or a similar program to add your URL to the Copyright field of your image. (If you want to save time we recommend that you create a Photoshop Action to do this.) The format of the URL is simple just put something like YOURDOMAIN.COM leaving out the "www" or any other subdomain text. Then you will recieve an email every time one of your images is found where the EXIF data does not match the domain that is displaying the image. Much like Google Alerts, but with any image that you tag with your domain.
How do I sign up? Follow: Image Tracking to register your email and domains with our robot.
How About A Little Egami Triva?Egami - is the word "image" spelled backwards. The reason for this becoming the name of our Web Bot is because the purpose of the bot is to find the images that you put online and tell you if they are not where they are supposed to be. (If you think the name is kind of dumb it's because the meaning behind it is just too deep for you to understand.)
Why doesn't Egami obey Robots.txt directives? Maybe because dirty web masters may try to hide pirated images behind private image folders, and because any blocked headers recieved by Egami just mean that the site needs to be flagged as suspecious and there needs to be a manual review of the site to be sure that the images displayed are not stolen.
How do I keep you off my site? Just block Egami bot by User Agent because the bot only uses the one listed above, but be aware that any site that is not accessible by Egami Bot will be listed on our site as uncrawlable and flagged for a manual review by our users. (Don't think this will win you any bonus points in traffic. Our denizens are fanatical about their copyrights and those of their counterparts, so by blocking Egami Bot for it's short visit you may encounter a horde of curious image seakers looking for stolen images.)
You traffic is killing me, how do I slow Egami Bot? Honestly? We only hit the same site once every 30 seconds at a maximum which means you probably need to upgrade your server if we are overloading your site. Besides we only hit each page once in a 30 day period so if we've crawled your site you probably won't see us again for a long time.
What happens if I am busted by Egami Bot? Well, that's up to the person that owns the image you have on your site. If they want to go through the legal process to collect damages from you or get their image removed from your site it is up to them. Egami Bot is simply a means of finding images that are on the web where they don't belong. If you are concerned about an image on your site after one of our crawls you should probably contact the owner of the image prior to them contacting you. Other than that, we have no advice, you are on your own.
Will I recieve a notice that I have a copyright image on my site? Not unless the owner of the image contacts you about the image. We only notify the owners of the images once the image is found, not the owner of the site where the image is found. Our goal is to protect the copyright of the owner of the image, not to warn the thief that the image has been stolen.
How can I help with the Egami Bot Project?
to help us increase our capacity so we can process more images at a faster rate, and help stop image theft. Your support is appreciated.