You know the feeling when you have worked so hard on photographing and editing a photo only to find out that someone has posted the photo in their gallery without crediting you? And maybe even posting the content as if it was their own. It’s the worst feeling, especially if the “Report” action does not seem to do or change anything. There is a different way how you can report stolen photo in Instagram.
You own the copyright to all the content you post (as long as it is original). If someone has shared your photo, but didn’t give the credit – you can fill out Instagram’s Copyright Report Form to have the photo removed.
I haven’t had the need to report any account that use my content without my permission until recently when I found an account using my content and claiming it to be captured on a phone by them. When even contacting the person and asking either to credit me or remove the photos didn’t result in any action – I chose to do it the hard way (not hard for me though).
How to fill out the Copyright report form
Even though this form may seem complicated and asking many information from you – it’s not. Let me walk you through the steps to report a stolen photo or content you found in Instagram:
- Open the copyright report form
- Choose “I am the rights owner” option
- Provide your contact information
- Add your contact information. The required fields are:
- Your full name
- Email address (It will be used to send you updates about this report)
- Name of the rights owner (same as your full name)
- Choose your country under “Where is the rights owner based?“
- Add your contact information. The required fields are:
- Indicate your copyrighted work
- Choose “Photo” or “Video” under “Which of these best describes the copyrighted work?”
- In the text field provide the links to your own work that the user has stolen. You can separate the links with a space
- Indicate the content that you want taken down
- Choose “Photo, video or post” under “Content that you want to report”
- In the text field provide the links to the photos/posts that you want taken down. You can separate the links with a space
- Choose “This content copies my work” under “Describe why you are reporting this content“
- Feel free to write any other useful information in the following text field to help the reviewers understand your issue better. You can:
- Include information about your messaging with the user
- Mention whether the user declined removing your content or whether the user has blocked you
- Write your full name under “Electronic signature”
- Submit the form.
Here’s how I filled out the form
Feel free to copy from me!
What to do next?
After completing these steps, you will receive a confirmation email within a few minutes to hours stating that your report have been received. A couple of more hours to days and you should receive an email that the content has been removed from the reported account. For me it took only one day to have my photos taken down.
Take a note that if the content is no longer in your gallery – it might be harder to convince Instagram that the photo is really taken by you. You can attach more than one photo from the shooting day under 6th step to convince the report reviewer that the photo is really taken by you originally. Or you can attach a photo that is larger in resolution than the one in the thief’s gallery.
What can I do if I see someone using someone else’s photo without permission?
Don’t report it yourself. Notify the user, sending them a link to the post that uses their photo. If the user does not know how to report the content, you can share the link to this blog post to them in DM.
Tap here to copy the link to this article. Afterwards you can send it to other users.
Take a note that if a user’s content is reported multiple times and by different user – Instagram might eventually take down their account and a thief is no more.
Conclusion
Stay sharp and help the Instagram community to become a better one. When you notice an uncredited artwork in someone’s gallery that you know whom it belongs to – notify the user. When your own content is stolen – don’t bother to report it using the “Report” button – use the copyright report form that I described and report stolen photo the right way.
