It’s annoying enough when someone steals your photo. It’s even worse when the photo is a self-portrait. When the picture was taken at age fourteen and reappears on the cover of a porn DVD, things are about as bad as they get.

But that’s what happened to Lara Jade Coton, a 17-year-old photography student from the Midlands in England. Jade had posted the picture on deviantART, complete with copyright symbol and watermark. Someone familiar with her work then spotted it on the cover of a DVD called “Body Magic,” a film which proudly boasts “Hustler’s highest rating.”

Shocked, Lara traced the movie back to a Texan company called TVX Films, who she says on her Flickr page, make new covers for old sex films. She sent them “a long and ‘friendly’ letter” and received a reply from the company’s owner stating that he doesn’t steal images and that he received the picture from a company with whom he’s been doing business for 25 years.

“Apparently they got it [the picture] from an adult freeshare website,” Lara told us by email. “But they can’t remember the link.”

Although the company stated that it would stop selling the DVD until the cover was replaced, the email exchange — or at least the pornographer’s side of it — was pretty unpleasant. In fact, it was as much the reaction of the company’s president as the act itself that prompted Lara to seek legal action. “If the president of TVX would have resolved this professionally in the first place, rather than being rude [it would have been a lot easier],” she said. “He’s just made things ten times harder for himself.”

Not that things were easy for Lara. Lawyers told her that it would cost around £50,000 to take TVX to court in a demand for compensation. And she found that the image was still being used by retailers. (Someone claiming to represent TVX commented on consumerist.com that the cover was immediately replaced, but admitted that some websites “still feature the older cover, and they have not changed that image – but are selling the film with the revised cover.” That sounds like a very expensive confession.)

So Lara turned to the photographic community. She posted a plea for help on Flickr, describing what had happened and displaying the stolen photo.

That seemed to get things moving. Her post generated over 400 comments and attracted the attention of the press in places as far apart as Sweden, Chile and Italy, as well as publications in England. A legal process has apparently started, although until it’s confirmed Lara feels unable to talk about it in detail. “However, the media has been a huge help,” she said.

So is this a victory for the collective power of photographers? Not yet, and even if Lara is able to sue TVX for very large sums of cash, not even then. The reason that Lara has been able to make the progress she has is not because she has the legal system working in her favor but that she has the press and public opinion working in her favor. If the stolen image had been not of a 14-year-old girl but of a top hat, and if it had appeared on the cover of a fashion video and not a sex film, would the picture-thief have changed it — and compensated her? Even with the support of 400 other photographers, it’s hard to believe, isn’t it?

Self-portrait by Lara Jade Coton.