In an email from Create Hype this week, Justine Smith mentioned the discovery of Tin Eye, a reverse image search engine. What’s that? It’s a way to discover if someone has appropriated your images; you simply upload your image or a link to your image, and Tin Eye’s little robots run out into the interwebs and check to see if that image appears anywhere else, is being used in a modified form, or if a higher resolution version exists. It’s not as widespread as Google yet, but it’s a simple way to check and see if your images are being used by someone else without your permission.

If you’re concerned about whether your web content (like blog articles, or just your site’s text) has been appropriated without permission, you can find that out, too. Just point your mouse to the Copyscape Plagiarism Checker, and enter a page’s url.

While it’s unfortunate, there are a few unscrupulous people out there who do copy work, or use other peoples’ pictures instead of their own. Thankfully there are tools like these to help you find them and ask them nicely to cut it out. If you want more information on how crafters can address sticky legal issues like copycats, there’s a nice article on the topic at Outright.com‘s blog, also written by Justine.