These folks have been mentioned in the SSID forum but I am more interested in the other side of the question. Do they provide a good and worthy service that should be encouraged by letting them crawl? Or are they a bunch of no-good scammers?
They've got twin informational sites:
[
pixray-seeker.com...] (in German)
[
pixray.com...] (defaults to English but if you look closely you can tell the primary language is German)
Can't figure out how to get the first version into English, but I think they're mainly targeting Germans anyway. (The robot lives at Hetzner and the price of the service is given in euros.)
They say:
Der PIXRAY Seeker™ ermöglicht Fotographen, Bildagenturen, Markeninhabern, Produktherstellern, Verlagen, Lizenzgebern und Händlern zu verfolgen, wo im Web Ihre Fotos und Markensymbole verwendet werden.
Auf diese Weise haben Sie Ihre Bilder voll unter Kontrolle und können
* die Verbreitung Ihrer Inhalte analysieren
* Verbreitungskanäle effektiv steuern
* unautorisierte Verwendungen Ihrer Bilder und Symbole unterbinden
* ansonsten verlorene Lizenzgebühren realisieren
... and then a bunch of technical details about how they determine whether someone has swiped your image.
In my case, the images they picked up each have titles that sound as if they
could belong to someone else, or could be copies of copyrighted material. For example, the people who own the rights to the movie "Funny Face" will be reassured to see that FunnyFace.jpg is a picture of a rat, not an unauthorized still.
Any Germans out there? What's your opinion?