I feel comfortable I am well within TOS to contact this advertiser regarding the use of my copyrighted material. However, issues that may be considered a violation of TOS could arise down the road as a result of this contact.

I can sympathise with your situation, but as there's clearly a potential conflict here, I'd contact Adsense first and see what they advise.

it is possible that a direct advertising or link relationship could result

Um, why would you actually consider working with someone who is stealing your images and using them to make money? That should be a major red flag and a warning against doing business with them.

You are also well within your rights to try and negotiate for rights to your pictures in any way that you see fit. If you can change this situation into an advantage for yourself, you should do it. That is the way the big players do things in most IP cases.

The one thing you probably should not do is bring up adsense or having them purchase advertising on your site directly, at least at first. But if you have a relationship with someone, outside AdSense, it would then be perfectly normal to discuss such things at a later time.

Um, why would you actually consider working with someone who is stealing your images and using them to make money?

Slightly off topic however relevant to the question:

In my situation there are thousands of sites around the world using my images, hosted by themselves, and many promote their products via AdSense on my pages.

Unlike Powdork, I assume, I am one of the major international suppliers of my specialised construction products and I would rather companies used my professionally optimised images rather than some of the attempts I've seen.

If they can't even afford to own a camera and go out and take their own photographs, then how can there be any great amount of "money"?

Cripes! It would take me 30-45 minutes to drive up to your area and spend part of a day photographing whatever is of real interest.

Do the DMCA and do it now.

Powdork, what money?

How about enough money to buy advertising?

How about the additional money that Powdork might get from improved SERPs from an additional relevant incoming link?

Why are you so against contemplating the options that might actually be to Powdork's advantage? They are Powdork's pictures, not your's.

This is the AdSense forum after all, and Powdork's question was about how this would affect his account, not whether to file a DMCA or not. That is still an option if negotiations don't work out. The question is how it would affect his AdSense account.

The point is that it would be easier to get a link (one of the only external links on the entire site) than to go hardline. The images being used isn't actually hurting me. On my site they are much higher res; the image is why you're there rather than as support for the content as on the offending site. I expect that people will grab my images (it's a compliment actually), and when they do, i'd rather get something out of it than fight to get them offline.

I simply cannot condone or encourage outright theft and in my eyes this is what it is.

At the very least, they should give you credit and a link.

At the very least, they should give you credit and a link.

And yes, depending a a bunch of factors you can turn this into anything from fight with no good outcome to a cooperative deal that generates traffic and maybe money.

Sometimes a fight costs more than winning brings.

For one thing, if you have the negative, it is easy to prove with film photos.

As for digital photos, I don't know of anyone that posts their photographs professionally that does not edit and reduce the original. You go into court with the original image from the camera, with all the correct data to match your camera model and surrounding pictures and times, then show the image you created and show the software and intermediate files, and you have an easy win.