Fly-By-Night iPod-iPhone Repair Startups Can’t Keep Their Hands Off Off Our Images

I fancy myself to be a pretty good photographer, but I’m NOT winning any awards or anything like former MacMedic Evan Bishop (If you’re looking for a GREAT Professional Photographer in San Diego, CA, please do look him up). As an amateur photog, I take a fair amount of of the pictures here at MacMedics. One of my images has been repeatedly ripped off for use by other iPhone service firms.

Why do less scrupulous iPhone/iPod service concerns keep ripping this image off? Well, here’s the reason: In order to take a picture of the highly reflective iPhone (shooting directly at the iPhone glass), you have to jump through some hoops to get the cracks to show up in focus. We then “lightly” edited the image of the broken iPhone in Photoshop to show off the cracks and make the image really “ad worthy”. We actually put quite a bit of work into just this one picture!

There’s quite an abundance of these “Fly-By- Night” businesses operating in the dark, murky waters of the Internet. A favorite place to hang up a shingle seems to be on-line classified giant, Craigslist. In most of the postings I’ve seen, there’s no website and no physical address to visit. So in essence, you’re going to hire a guy off Craigslist, who’s not part of a long-term reputable business, and invite him to your house to fix your iPhone? You might as well just wander over to your closest open-air drug market to see if you can find some small electronics repair help. Okay I’m sure that some of these guys are just trying to break into the biz, but really folks, people have been killed by people they have hired from Craigslist (and other on-line classified ads services).

If the repair you have done has a problem, do you really think this guy will come back and re-fix the problem? Where are his parts coming from? Are they real deal or just “high copy” foreign counterfeit replacement parts that came from eBay?

In the long run, do you really want some guy who ripped off his advertising artwork from someone else working on your iPod or iPhone?

In the case mentioned in this Blog post, the Craigslist poster did not even bother to try and crop our logo out! I guess that might be good for us, as it’s advertising for MacMedics. Here’s a link to a large size picture of the Craigslist ad posting so you can get a close look at our logo.

Here’s a link to another instance of the SAME image being ripped off by someone else from a previous post about this topic from the MacMedics Blog.

MacMedics is well know for our award-winning Macintosh service & consulting, as well as our iPhone & iPod repair. So much so, that other firms offering similar services have ripped off our name, our look, and even our ads.

In the case listed below, the image used in our ad was a photo that we actually took in our office. believe it or not, it’s quite difficult to get a picture of an iPhone facing the camera straight on. The iPhone’s glass or lens reflects right back to the camera so getting a good shot was no easy task. In order to get the shot for this ad, we created our own “white box” to place the iPhone so we could get the best shot possible.

MacMedics holds a U.S. Government Trademark on the name “MacMedics”.

Here’s one of the more recent cases of someone ripping MacMedics off. In order to prevent unintentional promotion for the other business, the names and information have been blurred out to protect the not so innocent.

I did e-mail the firm that posted this ad, and while they offered no apology or explanation, they did change the ad so that our image was no longer in the ad. They also switched up the layout of the ad, so it no longer appears to be a direct rip off. For that, I thank them.