Brand Disaster: Friendster.com steals image from istockphoto.com

For our “Brand Disaster” episode of the week, let’s look at Friendster.com’s new scandal - stealing photos

Background Image used in this "log in" has istockphoto.com's watermark. By viewing the back ground image one can see clearly the watermark.

from istockphoto.com.

First off, kudos for the blogger behind “Tittle-Tatlle” for posting this one – great find!

As we all know, Friendster updated its look and feel to accommodate new demands from its users – a major update of its website was being made hoping to even the battle field against major social networking sites.

Actually, things went well though most professionals still don’t buy it because as you can see the update was not meant for professionals who wants to network with fellow professionals and have a great time but for “kids” who wants to have fun! But, to give justice to Friendster’s major revamp, the site now looks cool and appealing for teens, but the sad part is that they steal photos from istockphoto.com of which a few hundred bloggers or so already noticed it.

You can actually check this link: http://www.friendster.com/login.php and view the background image of the log in section. On that part you can notice the istockphoto watermark on the left edge of the login form.

To get a clearer view, you may follow this simple tutorials:

• First, hover the cursor over the vector image.
• Right-click then select the “View Background Image”.

Here’s how it looks in this url: http://images.friendster.com/images/v2/bgLogin.jpg. I already saved a copy in my hard drive just in case Friendster will remove the image.

As we all know, istockphoto.com is one of the leading resource for images/graphics, but of course you need to buy it in order for them to remove the watermark. And if the watermark is not removed, that means you’re using the image without consent that is also tantamount to stealing.

So, what do you think? Is it not – stealing? Anyway, I just hope that the recent acquisition of Friendster.com (Kuala Lumpur-based MOL) would save Friendster’s recent mess, but that I doubt. This will surely stick!