Discovered a page on Instagram posting one of our images and attributing it to someone else.

Yesterday evening I opened up Instagram and was a little surprised to see one of my pictures in the highlighted or "trending" area and clicked on it to see what was going on.

It was my picture alright, posted by another account without my permission and they had given credit to someone else and not me.

It had almost 1000 likes and the page had a little over 5000 followers, so it's not a huge page but still decently sized.

This isn't the first time by any means I've discovered others sharing my work or my father's work without permission, though this is the first time I can remember that someone else was being attributed by name to have taken my image. And it was a bit unsettling.

When I pointed this out, they said they'd fix it if they were given the wrong info, I proceeded to give a chain of custody of evidence to help prove I was the owner of the image and they gave me credit.

They never asked for permission to post it like they should have and just gave me credit, and my name was put in there after the nearly a thousand people saw it and the peak of when traffic is directed to an image so it's doubtful I'll even get any followers from it, and I could have been more strict and asked them to take it down or whatever, but... I believe in freedom and peace and love and I put my artwork out there without any watermarks to share with the world for free, without expectation of getting anything in return.

I remember one time years ago Google Earth shared this same image of mine on their Twitter page without permission and it got I think around 5 million views, and I probably could have sued them since they are a BIG company and they shouldn't be making those kinds of mistakes of posting other peoples artwork without their permission, but... I once again didn't let it bother me. I'm just happy that an image I took has been appreciated by so many people and that it temporarily put some happiness and magic and wonder into the lives of others even if for just a moment. <3

PS... Just to be clear, my father partly owns this image as well. I was the one who was operating the video camera and I captured it, but we were working together and there was only one video camera, so we sort of share this one. I tend to refer to it as "my shot" but in all reality, we both share this one.

PSPS The person who was operating the account later told me that someone else had posted the image on their page and gave them permission to post it and gave them the "wrong" name... I'm curious to try to dig a little deeper and see what happened there and if someone is trying to take credit for what is not theirs, or if it was some kind of mistake? I guess we'll see if I can find out anything else about this, though whatever the case... It is what it is.

PSPSPS
Just did some more searching, I followed the tag from the Instagram page that shared the image "#margaretjoyweaver", which was removed after I confronted them, but I screenshotted it first thankfully... And I found a private account on Instagram so I couldn't look further there, but on Facebook I typed her name in as well and... Her page was public enough for me to find this.

She is giving Brian Oakley credit and apparently claiming she saw it in person herself??? smh... It looks like I'm probably going to have to send her a message and ask why she's claiming these things.