The Stolen Puppy

The other night, just before bed, I received a PM from a member on the doberman forum. She said she was searching for red doberman photos online and came across some on a website called The Daily Puppy and there were some pics that looked a lot like Red.

I went to the link she provided, and such enough, there were about 10 photos of Red that I have taken over the last year or so, posted up under the name "Bueno the Doberman" - complete with made-up lifestory and everything! There were a ton of comments about what nice photos and a great dog Bueno is, all dating back from July of this year.

I stared at the photos that I took of MY dog, and my mouth fell open. My heart started pounding as if I had just sprinted a mile. The blood rushed to my face and I felt sick. My cherished photos of my Redders - stolen and posted by someone else with a made-up name and story. I couldn't believe it.

The first thing I did was create an account on The Daily Puppy, and commented on "Bueno's" page - how dare they use my pics, that is NOT their dog and are stolen photos and to remove them immediately. Then I reported the page to the site administrators.

The next thing I did was create a thread on DT (Dobermantalk.com - my doberman haven!) and announce that Red's photos have been stolen and posted the link. Within 5 minutes, many more people had created accounts on The Daily Puppy and comments on the page about how this person stole photos and they need to be removed. Within 10 minutes, people were posting contact information to the copyright department for me, had found 2 more pages that have been using stolen photos of Red (one as a water rescue dog who rescues people from the water! as he's pictured wearing his lifejacket on my dad's boat), and even more people had signed up to raise hell on The Daily Puppy.

By about 2am, my thread had swelled to 3 pages of 40 replies each, and I couldn't take looking at Red's pics on that site anymore and I went to bed. I had to work in the afternoon the next day, so my plan was to get up and call the copyright department first thing in the morning.

The next day, I tried calling - and of course, they are located in California on Pacific time so the offices weren't open yet. I tried calling the other offices, but the phone system would not route me to a person, and would not let me leave a message. Instead, I contented my self with re-reporting the offending pages, emailing the copyright division, and emailing The Daily Puppy a very colorful email. I also called my brother-in-law who is a lawyer about it and sent him the links. He said if the site didn't taken them down after a few days, he would send them a letter.

As hard as it was to handle knowing that someone had stolen all these pics from me, having all my DT friends stand behind me like that meant everything to me and made it so much easier to deal with. They had continued posting throughout the night on The Daily Puppy and were continuing to stand behind me in my thread on DT. As the day went on and more people saw what had been going on all night, more people registered on The Daily Puppy and commented and reported the stolen pics.

Due to the immense response and persistence of the DT crew, the photos were removed by about 3pm that day. I truly think the pics would not have been removed as quickly or no-questions-asked if the DT people hadn't been there the whole time, commenting and posting and raising the alarm.

Since then, I have deleted all my photos in my DT gallery and am in the process of watermarking all my photos and re-uploading them to photobucket, which is extremely daunting considering the sheer number of photos I have shared on that site, but I can't risk having my puppers' pics stolen again. It was such a slap in the face and a violation of my personal possessions, that I never want to relive it again.

Most importantly, I can't express how much what everyone on DT did meant to me - having all of them come together to support Red and I. We are a very tight-knit community and this proves that you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us. And Doberman owners are not people you really want to fuck with.