BEWARE:
Photo Pirates on the Internet

Why would someone steal our photos? One of the most common things we hear from people looking for live rock, is that they have bought some that looked great in the pictures, but they got junk. The Federal Trade Commission just posted its annual list of "most common complaints."   In the "Top 5" was Internet fraud - people being sold one thing, and getting another. It should not surprise us that most of the scum is not in our tanks, but in the industry, and that we have the same liars, crooks, and cheats as any other business. In fact, in our field, it's easy ... you just steal the best-looking live rock photos you can find on the Net, and you send some other live rock (e.g., base or boat). Sadly, this goes on all the time.

It's wonderful when we hear people tell us how much they have enjoyed the photos on our website ... if someone wants to download one for a desktop, great! If someone wanted to make a calendar with some for themselves, great! If, however, someone wants to sell that calendar for profit, they are breaking the law, it's copyright infringement. It is therefore with great disgust we are compelled to say we have discovered that another company has been using our photos on their website.



It should be understood that companies who do this are misrepresenting whatever they are selling. Certainly, they have not seen the live rock in the photos they are using; and, they wouldn't be able to tell you where or when the photos were taken, yet they are perfectly willing to try to pull the wool over the eyes of their customers to make a buck. When a company uses another company's photos to represent something they sell, they are misrepresenting themselves and the product. This is insanity folks !!!!

All of the photos within our website belong to us ... all but about two of them (photos taken by others which we are allowed to use with their permission) are photos of live rock we have had in our possession and are an actual representation of the live rock we sell.



You may see the live rock photos shown on this page (taken from e.g., our Tonga live rock photo page) somewhere else on the Internet, and if you do, rest assured that they were stolen from us. Any other company featuring any of our photos as their own is dishonest, and is using them without permission.

Update: Tonga live rock is no longer available via air-freight.


We personally took the photos of our live rock. We bought it, brought it to our facility, photographed it and shipped it to our customers. Where is their live rock? Have they even seen it? Apparently not long enough to take a picture of it! What are they REALLY going to ship you? Why don't these people have any pictures of their own? These people could only muster the honesty, integrity, morals, and ethics to steal from us to lie to you. Good luck, should you do business with anyone who is stealing pictures of stuff they never saw on another company's website, claiming and selling it as their own. We don't like crooks and we don't like cheaters. Period.

We should be able to create something original and share it on our website without the threat of "unscrupulous scum" coming along and using those photos for their own purposes. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and this is the reason why most of our photos are now being marked with our name across them.



It has taken decades for us to build our photo files and acquire the knowledge that it takes to write the kind of material that is featured on our website. It is proprietary and we own it ... it is all copyrighted. Every word and photo you see on our website is original and was written by us from scratch. We have every bit of it on dated floppies (!) to prove it! We find it despicable that many of these lines (verbage) from our website have been pirated and now appear on numerous websites out there. It would seem as though these folks could write original work of their own.

During the time when live rock was being collected and sold from the Marshall Islands, the importer told me that they had seen their photos of the rock from their website displayed on the websites of companies that had never purchased a box of live rock from them. This is what is going on out there ... buyer beware!!

If you should spot our photos or copyrighted articles elsewhere, please make a note of where you saw the material and let us know.

Be careful out there!
birdfish

© www.livestockusa.org, 2006-2024