My website robbed by "Gallery"

[lesged]

I wonder if  other members of Nelsonfoto have had their websites usurped, taken over and their photos sold without permission or recompense.

Well, mine has been taken over by an organization (maybe one  unscrupulous person) calling itself "Gallery." It has taken my website  www.lesgediman.com and added a slash with other words. The owner is listed as the Gallery Administrator. See below:


http://www.lesgediman.com/photography/main.php

I can't find out a way to contact anyone at "Gallery," where it exists and what protection is there from this cyber crime (IMO) What agency can I contact to explain and complain about this serious ripoff?

Bad enough to steal my work, but the scans that are displayed on this pilfered website are awful.

Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Les Gediman

[Philip]

Les, I've never seen this before. I notice it gives a variety of companies' names to print your images through.  Presumably "Gallery" is a consortium of these companies or a service to them since the money purchasers would pay would go to whichever printer they chose. 

Or perhaps, by way of some fancy software manhandling, to "Gallery" for no service at all.

But not to you! This does look distressing.

Philip

[Kin Lau]

"Gallery" is actually just the name of the software being used, you can click thru on the link at the lower left.

It looks like your website provider may have just updated or re-installed the software, and left all the default links up, instead of disabling or removing them.

[shadowfox]

Les, this is unlikely to be a malicious one.
As Kin suggested, talk to your webmaster and ask what on earth is going on.

[lesged]

Philip, Kin and Will,

Thanks all for your comments and suggestions.

Thanks for the  information  I got  by clicking on the lower left corner Gallery logo on the Gallery version of my website. I read about Gallery’s  software the man who created it:: Bharat Mediratta

It may seem harmless and only a social network promotion of an individual’s pet project  to help photographers to  sell the prints. I do not see this as altruistic. Its purpose is not to offer a free boilerplate that I could use at my discretion. No, it’s way beyond that: it’s now freely circulating on the internet, totally out of my control. Anyone clicking on my original website www.LesGediman.com will only see Bharat Mediratta‘s usurped version of my first website created by my sons, Marc and Dan Gediman, as a  surprise 75th birthday present..

Anyone looking for www.LesGediman.com will only see Bharat Mediratta’s horribly scanned version of the original website. The public can now buy bad quality prints at super bargain basement prices from a selection of various commercial photo printers, just by clicking on any of my photos in Bharat Mediratta's "Gallery" without anyone getting my permission to do so. Who gave him that right?  Are we all vulnerable to these creeps?

[taulen]

This have all been an accident, I'm sure. Noone, escpeially not Bharat Mediratta, have tried to do this to earn money. Probably the domain/web-hotell-adminstrator have done some changes, updates or something, that have made the template thats placed over the gallery to have been disabled or removed. Probably an accident. The "buy print" is a standard funtion within the gallery, and have been disabled until this accident happened, and you can again disable it within the control-panel. Ask your web-hotell-administrator if they can check theire logs to see if they can see what have happened, and maybe they can even fix it, unless you probably need to talk yo your sons, about getting it back to normal.

Edit:
Had this been an attempt from Bharat Mediratta, they would of course have used the newest version of the gallery, the one on your page is version 2, the newest at the moment is 3.0.2.
And the template is what have made the "gallery" look different, and also disabled the functions that you now can see, but didnt before.

I use the same gallery, on my own web-site I use to promote "voss-lan". YOu can have a look here : http://voss-lan.org/gallery/main.php Here you also can see a different "standard" template, to make it look different.
And here : http://gallery.menalto.com/gallery/demosites/ you can see different templates, alot of them, all just there to make it look different. And some infact make theire own templates, so noone else have the same.

[jamesmck]

Les - I agree that the issue here is with your web-hosting company (Godaddy?) and not the software developer.  Is there any chance that you may have overlooked a notification of this change?  You may want to check your spam folder on Gmail.

James

[phule]

Les,

As has been mentioned, this is a problem with your web host, not with the Gallery software.    No one from Gallery has taken over your images, no one is trying to sell your images. 

What you're saying, essentially, is about the same as saying "This guy named Bill Gates took everything I've written on my computer and is using it to promote something called 'Microsoft Word'."       Word is the tool used to create the document, just like Gallery is the tool used to create the online photo album. 

There is no deliberate malfeasance here.  Turning off the ability to order prints is something that you, as site owner, should have no problem doing.   I would encourage you to contact your web host and ask about what updates where made to your site.   If your host is GoDaddy you should even have the ability to roll back those changes.

[lesged]

Philip, Kin, Will,Taulen, James and phule

I'm sorry to have bothered you folks. I was totally wrong thinking Mr. Bharat Mediratta had anything to do with what I feared.

It was, as suggested by several members,that I misconstrued what happened to my website. I realize now it was never "robbed."

It happened when my son, Marc the webmaster, was changing hosts and one of the templates offered was from "gallery" software. I should have consulted with Marc before I posted this thread.

Thanks for all your comments and suggestion