Is a hover-over credit acceptable when ‘borrowing’ an image?

I don’t think there’s anything that can be done about people stealing your images on the internet, but at least there should be some etiquette to it, right?

I get a message that some of my Motoring Middle East images are being used on another automotive website. Heading over there, I do indeed count five images that I recognise as those I’ve snapped myself. But the Motoring Middle East logo/watermark has been cropped off the pictures.

Not wanting to be unreasonable about it, I email them asking that our images be used with the logo intact and a link back to our website.

The response tells me that all images are already credited to MME. Huh?! Where? I don’t see it.

Eventually I realise that if you hover over the image with your cursor, a tag comes up with the link ‘picture courtesy of MotoringME.com’.

Please do correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think that’s acceptable. The credit should be clearly visible at all times – especially as you’ve gone to the effort of cutting out our logo.

And this presents other problems for us. Recently I got into an email debate with another publisher who had used one of my MME images. Again with no logo.

But in his case he claimed that he didn’t know it was our image because he had ‘found’ it on the internet. Which is to suggest that someone else had already previously removed the log.

Anyway, my next message to the this website that has used five of my photos will be an invoice. Do you think that’s fair?