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This site is a God-send for artists who have had their work ripped/stolen by art thieves. A lot of people believe that just because something is posted on the internet, it is public domain and this is simply not true.  Works of art created by someone are copyrighted and protected by federal law under the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998). Before this Tin Eye came along, we've had to google images using keywords and hope for the best. Not the most effective way of finding images. Tin Eye works just like Google or Yahoo! does, but it searches using the actual image, or a URL for an image.

It's in beta testing right now and you have to sign up to be a tester, and they only have 702 million images categorized as of now, but it's proved useful to several artists that I know that have had their work stolen many times in the past.

Now, I don't worry about that as much, but I got curious and did a check of one my images, Fetish, ©2007, one of my most popular. It was being used as a poster image for a band...or something. And they had even taken my signature and copyright warning off and changed it almost completely!!!

Before

After
 

Grr....these people make me mad.  I also noticed a couple of other images of mine that had been used by others... Sigh.

That said, Tin Eye is my new best friend when it comes to image searching...I bet it would also be useful for art history papers too... :)