Another local fence company used (stole) one of my images

[SuperNovi]

We have a local fence business in Oklahoma City and one of the other local fence companies took the liberty of using one of our images that I took myself on their website...creating a similar page even.

They took the our image from this page:

http://www.a-better-fence-construction.com/metal-fence-post.html

And used it on their page (2x they used it!):

http://fenceokc.com/2016/07/13/all-about-fence-posts/

They didn't even bother renaming the file "metal-fence-post.jpg"!

I'm not experienced in what I should do?

(I did a google image search and lots of websites are using it...but one contractor locally in OKC is using it and one in Dallas area is also using it.)  I just wonder what other people are doing to prevent images being used or if your not worrying about it.

Brad

metal-fence-post.jpg

[KevinBudzynski]

You can file a DMCA complaint and do a removal request to Google. However, the best remedy I found is to contact them and letting them know and asking them to take it down before some repercussion. Good luck!

[SuperNovi]

Thanks Kevin!

You know something just occurred to me that maybe Google sees that they have used the same image and it occurred on our website first.  So Google may recognize that they are using the same copied image??

Or something else I considered, if I ask them to remove it then that may spark them to create better other images of their own (which they should do anyway).

My theory therefore is possibly to just leave it alone?  Anyway, it's just a thought.