Nobody Messes With Officers Katie & Waffles

Officers Katie & Waffles

OFFICER KATIE:  Hi everyone, Officer Katie here. Last night on Facebook, one of our dear friends and readers sent us a message. Seems they saw another Facebook page passing off a photo of me and Orange Crush here as their own.

OFFICER WAFFLES:  Boss, that's not cool, right?

OFFICER KATIE:  No, Waffles. It it's not only not cool, it's not LEGAL.

OFFICER WAFFLES:  Um Boss, which picture was it? I hope we were wearing our furs!

OFFICER KATIE:  Well thank Cod Waffles, we were both fully furred. In fact, it's this very photo of you and me walking. It was just taken over the weekend and appeared for the first time Sunday on our Badass Cats blog post.

Like we always do, we posted a teaser and blog link on our Facebook page and included the photo. We love it when people enjoy our photos and share them. That's how many people find our blog. We also like to share other page's photos and always credit or tag where the photo came from.

What was particularly shocking in this case is that our photo was posted on another Facebook page as if it was their own. In fact, our copyright watermark was even REMOVED.

OFFICER WAFFLES:  Boss, that's almost as bad as being naked!

OFFICER KATIE:  We've reached out to the owners of the page asking them to either remove the photo or edit it to include the appropriate copyright and link back to our page. We didn't accuse them, because we can't be 100% certain they were the ones that removed our watermark. But we're pretty web savvy and have been able to track down all instances of where this photo was shared, and nowhere was the copyright removed except for the "Cats Paradise" Facebook page.

And if anyone should know better, it's them. They have almost a half million likes and do virtually nothing but post cat photos.

OFFICER WAFFLES:  Boss! On their page over 800 other people shared our photo! ...the one WITHOUT the watery mark. And like 9,000 people liked the picture!

OFFICER KATIE:  Yup. Imagine how nice it would have been to have had some of those people visit our page and meet us.

OFFICER WAFFLES:  That stinks, Boss. What can we do?

OFFICER KATIE:  Well, we'll see if we hear back from the page owners. In the meantime, do you know what's REALLY cool?

OFFICER WAFFLES:  Our hats?

OFFICER KATIE:   No, Waffles. Our FRIENDS. They've come rushing to our defense and have been leaving lots and lots of comments on our stolen photo. We work really hard to create original photography that we're proud of and it's discouraging to see it stolen like this.

Update: 

Just before we were about to publish this blog post, we heard back from the page owners:

"Picture taken down . Picture has been found on the net ( google) And no we don't take the watermark of . You can see that on our page we have more pictures with watermarks on ."

Our Reply:

"Thank you for removing it. I'd love to know you you found it on Google since it was just published for the first time yesterday. I was unable to find it through Google searches earlier this evening. As a fellow Facebook page owner and a photographer, I love having my images shared. But it's not fun when the credit is removed. I'm not accusing, and not saying you did...just expressing how frustrating it is. Thanks again."

Making the world a better place, one cat photo at a time.

Photohunt: *Copper* ... and Robber?

Hi everyone, Katie here.

Now that BlogPaws is behind us, it's back to normal here at the Townhouse. Well, as normal as normal can be when you're living with a teenage Orange Crush.

Today's Photohunt theme is *Copper.*

Looks a little more like *Dirty Copper* to me.

If anyone needs to be cuffed here, it's a certain Food, Toy & Trophy Thief.  NOT me.