MyGolfSpy.com Caught Stealing Images and Removing Watermarks!…..Again

My Golf Spy has already been caught red handed taking other web sites images and removing the watermarks in place of his own. Well he is at it  again stealing images this time of the Taylormade R9 Irons from GolfToImpress.  These images were taken directly by our partners.

In this blog post we sought out a Photoshop expert to break down the steps of MyGolfSpy's illegal watermark removal activities. Our expert Graham Barnes who has done work for top companies like Microsoft and Apple had this to say about it:

It is blatantly obvious that mygolfspy has cropped and duplicated the golf clubs and removed the GolfToImpress watermark. By looking closely at the golf clubs the gradient and stroke seems broken and cut in an amateur like fashion, the clubs are also blurry this is achieved by cropping out 1 club somewhat carefully and enlarging it then duplicating the club and positioning it at the chosen angle. This would of course be after the GolfToImpress logo on the original image has been removed but as the attached image suggests in figure 2, there were some discrepancies which do not appear on the original image leading me to believe the image has been stolen from a website and rebranded as another owners work which is illegal.

1. The clubs have been cropped and resized creating the blur in the mygolfspy picture.

2. The logo would have been cropped out first, the remaining space from the cropped out logo would have been filled by a pattern as it looks like from the mygolfspy picture which can simply be applied in Photoshop. Why would a gradient appear in such a strange place compared to the original picture, there is also the fact the gradient goes from green to black in the original however in the mygolfspy picture it’s simply black.

3. When enlarging or resizing a image such as this everything except its proportions remain the same such as the golf clubs, the figure 3 circle on the mygolfspy picture noting the space between the 3rd and 4th club from the back are further apart than in the original image leading me to believe every club was duplicated positioned accordingly to create the desired affect however this one club has been incorrectly positioned leading for me to believe this picture is a fake when compared to the original.

4. If a user zooms into the mygolfspy picture they can see its been cut as the true gradient flows naturally from green to black in this case it wouldn't simply go green then black there would be a smoother color change.

This isn't the first time mygolfspy has been caught doing things like this. If you remember several weeks back we posted a thread detailing the type of sneaky and dishonest internet tactics he uses to gain content and readers.  Click Here to View that Post. Ever since we caught this illigal use of our own and other websites images we have noticed a decrease in his posting activity. Lets hope that this discourages him from stealing images from websites like TourSpecGolf, GolfToImpress, GolfWRX, BombSquad Golf and dozens of others.