As this post will show, there are people out there who don't think twice about stealing your work and claiming it as their own. Stamping my name on my pictures is just one small attempt to protect my work. I'll admit though, I never thought that someone would do what this guy is accused of doing. I always assumed that if someone stole a picture from me it would be for a website but I never thought that a photographer might steal someone's work and claim it as their own for the purpose of attracting clients. It's one thing to use an image without paying for it but to use the image as a representation of your photography is just blatant fraud.
Let's say you have a website that is all about cars and you grab a great car image from another site to use. I can maybe understand that some people think that everything on the web is "sharable." They don't understand that you can't just grab any picture you see online and use it for your own purposes. But, there is no way that a photographer can claim that they didn't realize that it was wrong to build a photography business web site and populate it with images that were taken by other people.
As you will read in the thread I linked to above, the photography community dropped the hammer on this guy fast. You will never see a group of photographers work together more readily than when they discover someone is ripping them off.
