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Catering in Syracuse, the Saigon Cafe, stolen images and Christmas

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2010-12-25 00:07:44 - Graham Ellis

It was - indeed - a lovely buffet that we laid on at our old training centre in 2005 during a Perl course. So we took a picture of it, and included it in our slide show. Other, too, loved the picture and "hotlinked" it from our site into their various Plurks, to the extent that we were getting up to 10,000 downloads a day. (See [here]).

Hotlinking is a pretty crude way of stealing an image - it's visible to the owner of the site from whom the picture is stolen, and it becomes very obvious if the traffic levels are significant and the host site is a highly specialized one like ours. A much more (I'm choosing my words carefully) disguised way of using someone else's image is to save a copy onto your own site - for your site won't show up in the original site's log each time someone visits your page. And re-hosting also means that the original site is no longer able to delete / amend the image with a knock-on effect onto your page. Note that if the image is copyrighted, which the buffet lunch picture is, taking a copy and pretending it is your own is also theft - just a harder theft to trace. Or so I thought ...

I've come across a site called "Tineye" - at http://www.tineye.com/ - which offers a reverse image search. And it seems to be rather clever (much more clever than I would be) in that it can pick up duplicates from all sorts of places that it's crawled, even if they have been somewhat manipulated. I wonder what I can find for that buffet lunch ...

Click on any image to have it open, original size, in a new window. Follow any of the sites I've mentioned and you should link to the page - though they will change over time I expect!

From fibromyowgia.wordpress.com - a health meal for people with a medical condition, with the picture being used as illustrative material for a personal page. I'm not too fussed about such a (mis)use - just wish the folks had bothered to read our copyright page and get in touch as described [here].


From www.tiffanyscatering.com. Now this is very naughty, Tiffany's Catering Company of Syracuse, New York State, are using our picture and suggesting that its the sort of thing they provide. In the UK, I think they would be breaking the Trade Descriptions act as well as having stolen the image, and we have certainly never been called up from Melksham to serve lunch upstate New York!


From www2.dinhduong.com.vn. Oh gosh - not in English (nor French nor German); the clue is in the .vn (Vietnam) top level domain. But that's clearly a Well House Consultants Vintage Buffet Lunch again!


From www.canteen.yoyo.pl. ... and another ... this time from Poland. Nice clear use of the image, not distorted by size or recoloured!


From www.sodahead.com. A forum entry this time; I'm not totally happy that we may be seen to be supporting the forum message, but it's Christmas and I'm going to let this one and all the others pass ... but just beware of how stolen images are so commonly traced these days.


From www.vietbalo.vn/ And we have a second site from Vietnam - this one appearing to be much more professional, and even showing a seasonal message (I didn't know they had snow in Vietnam, nor that Santa came to call on a sleigh!)


Do I want to read the message that's being written alongside my picture? Too right I do! I understand a little American ;-) ... so I can see what Tiffany's Catering Company are doing ... but I don't understand Vietnamese. Google Translate to the rescue! It's at translate.google.com and you can pass in a URL and get the page translated between a wide variety of languages - not perfectly, but you can get the drift of what's being said.


Here is a rather better translation from Vietnamese to English - probably better because the original text may have been in Queen's Vietnamese (Chairman's Vietnamese? VBC Vietnamese?) and ... what do we have. They're using my image to sell the French buffet at the Saignon Cafe, Sheraton Hotel, in Ho Chi Minh City. Then they add the word "illustrative" to as if to say "this isn't really what you get!


You may have noticed that one of the earlier illustrations had a copyright on it. So - am I breaking copyright rules here by reproducing these pages - am I standing in a greenhouse and throwing stones? I don't believe that I am - the copyright in each of the buffet pictures above is mine, and around it I'm just showing a little decoration to put it into teh context for critical review, which is very much within the rules.

Ah - the Polish one, translated into English. Now - I admit it - I'm amused. The idea is that you can eat as much of a virtual buffet as you like, and you won't put any weight on. You can use this site to send a virtual cake - or other food gift - to anyone, without any fear that you'll end up being responsible for them putting on weight.


Christmas is a lot about food; I'm posting this late on Christmas eve to give myself time to prepare breakfast (hotel) and dinner (home) tomorrow - and that will be real rather than virtual food (so we can and possible will overdo it!). Please ... do feel free to have a look around the virtual world of our website, which like the Polish buffet is free and won't harm you however long you stay. But - if you ARE reading this on Christmas - spend some time with your family. If you happen to be alone today, and in Melksham, knock on our door / ring our bell. We'll have food to spare, and no-one should be alone at Christmas.

Happy Christmas, everyone!