On Thursday, Jonathan Morgan wrote about former ParentDish blogger J.D. Griffioen's discovery that a photo of his daughter that he posted at Flickr had been used without his permission by a parenting web site. This week, Chris at Notes from the Trenches learned that her daughter's photo was appearing on several pages at the Google social networking site Orkut. Like J. D., Chris' photo had been lifted from Flickr; in both cases, the photos were marked "all rights reserved," which means that they were taken via screen shot, rather than being downloaded.

In other words, they were stolen.

Chris -- and hundreds of other parents -- are trying to get Orkut to remove their children's photos from the site, but it's an uphill battle despite the fact that using stolen photographs is a violation of Orkut's terms of service. And a violation of copyright law. And just downright creepy.

What can you do to protect YOUR images? Short of not posting pictures at public sites, there's not much. You can restrict photos of your children (or ANY photos that you don't want made public) to "friends and family" status, which means that only designated Flickr users can see them. You can change your Flickr settings to "all rights reserved" (although Chris and J. D. had both done that, and their photos were lifted anyway). You can choose another photo sharing site, like Zoto, which is smaller than Flickr and hasn't had any real issues with stolen images.

Chris has opted to watermark her photos, which means that her copyright will appear across her kids' faces in any public photos of them. This makes it less likely that anyone will lift the pictures because the image is clearly marked.