Email the poor candidate: it’s his staff’s fault, not his, and he may not be websavvy enough to understand. Give him 48 hours to change things, and let him know that you’re planning a site redesign in 48 hours that may make the theft no longer in his best interests…
After the warning, if he doesn’t respect you, all bets are off.
Daniel
I concur with contacting the candidated directly (or someone close enough to him to relay the message). Copyright is serious business these days and I’d be surprised if he ignored you. Chances are he doesn’t know about it and his webmaster is just being a jerk. One of my clients had this problem, actually. After trading emails with the webmaster who ordained himself Copyright Guru (even though he was wrong about everything he said) I contacted the president of the company and the problem was solved shorted afterwards.
If contacting the candidate doesn’t do anything, change your file name so his link goes nowhere, or change the picture altogether. Have fun.
My serious suggestion is to email the candidate and explain in detail what is happening and why it is wrong. (Use small words. This is a politician after all.)
Be stern, be angry, but be polite.
Although, it would be funny to change the image to one promoting an opposing political party. Or Goatse. 
Don’t e-mail.
Call him and talk to him personally. Be your most professional, and let him know you will be happy to help him with further web designs, for a fee of course, but that you expect the images to be pulled from his website within 48 hours.
Who knows…you may get a job out of it.
Personally, I suggest something like “This Image Used Without Permission from the Website of www.yosemitebabe.com. Vote for the Other Guy!”
I’d say this assertion is rather questionable. Much more questionable than the assertion that you would be guilty of libel if you name him as a “thief”. So I’d avoid doing that.
Much better to start out politely telling him in your opinion this is rude, and you would like him to have his webmaster stop. You could even threaten to publicize this, or to change it to something embarrassing to him. That will probably get him to do so, if you are reasonable in talking to him. But that’s what you have to do, because I doubt that you have a leg to stand on, legally. (And it’s far easier than going to court over it!)
He’s using her work without payment or even attribution, and using the bandwidth that she pays for to promote his campaign. That pretty much counts as theft to my mind.
As to your parenthetical question - you don’t have to register something with the government Copyright Office for it to be considered protected. Like most websites, yosemitebabe’s has a notice at the bottom that says something like “all content copyright 2003 by Yosemitebabe”, which is more than enough.
Maybe.
But “your mind” is not the basis for the laws in our country.
As the copyright owner, Yosemitebabe, you have many rights over your work and one of the rights is the control over use and distribution of your creation. You did not consent to this webmaster’s use of your graphic and I can’t - off the top of my head - think of any exceptions/exemptions to copyright infringement that he can claim. Assuming you created the graphic post-1978, copyright notices are not even necessary for protection. In fact, now that you have objected and he’s refused to honor your requests to stop using your graphic, you could have wilfull infringment on your hands. Of course, taking anyone to court should be the absolute last thing you resort to and from what I can tell, it’s not worth it in your case. If you haven’t already, contact the candidate, who will probably be surprised at the facts. Send him correspondence from the webmaster if you have any. I would be very surprised if the candidate allows this to continue after knowing about it.
If you decide to go the “mischief” route, be very careful what you replace the graphic with. I know that the other guy started the mess, but you don’t want to make a to-do that casts any ill will on yourself.
t-bonham is incorrect both about bandwidth theft and the operation of copyright.
DakotaDog posted what I was going to suggest: Duplicate the graphic and alter the link on your own site, and on the original GIF being swiped, make it so every sixty seconds or so it flashes “SHOW ME YOUR TITS!” or something to that effect.
I’d also be curious to look at the properties for the other graphics on the site to see if they’re being swiped also.
Go to www.savingangel.org and DL one of the banners they have there for linking purposes and then put it up. That way, we’ll get the word out to the Oregon demographic…
Re-read the OP. Note the following:
yosemitebabe, if I were you I’d do one of a few things, but the most amusing one I think is simply changing it to advertising your website. Think of it as free advertisement! Hey, if the guy’s stealing your bandwidth, might as well take some of his web space.
Don’t do anything that will come back and bite you in the butt.
Though, **Pepperland **'s link is rather amusing. And I am not even an Angel Fan. Clever!
But the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is. In Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation, they ruled that linking directly to website images is copyright infringement.
I vote for contacting the candidate and politely asking that the links to your images be removed within 48 hours. If they are still not removed after 48 hours, go ahead and replace the images.
Pepperland, just for you.
This candidate is now endorsing Angel. 
I would have given them a Firefly button, but Angel actually might be saved still, and damn—that Muppets episode (the only Angel episode I’ve seen so far) was fabulous.
I looked more at the site: yes, they had the dimensions specificed on my graphic, so I couldn’t put up some huge graphic. Damn.
I also checked out all the other buttons and graphics on the site (they had pictures of flags, page separator bar graphics, picture of a beach) and ALL OF THEM WERE STOLEN off of someone else’s site.
That really pisses me off.
The site is not the most sophisticated design, but it’s simple and reasonably elegant. Uses style sheets and all that. It has what looks like a custom designed graphic at the top that is specific for the candidate. How the webmaster could do all of that, and yet not know that he (or she) can’t steal everyone else’s graphics and bandwidth is beyond me.
I liked the Angel graphic because it’s not mean-spirited and will be more puzzling than anything else to any site visitors. I don’t want to do anything mean to this guy, even though I don’t think that I have any moral or legal obligation to cut him a break. I can legally change that file to anything I damned well please, including something really nasty (as long as it doesn’t violate the policies of my own web host). But I don’t want to do that. But I could!
I do intend to email everyone listed on the “Contact us” site pretty soon. Basically, I want everyone involved with the campaign to know what the webmaster is doing.
t-bonham@scc.net, I think others here have explained copyright pretty well to you. But even if I had no legal right to stop the webmaster from displaying my graphic, I do have every right to replace that file with any damn thing I want.
The patriotic graphics I have on my site are “linkware.” That means that I give them away for free, for use on any site. All I ask is that they not be hotlinked (stealing my bandwidth) and that credit is given to my site (a small text link somewhere is fine). I give the damned graphics away for free, but for some folks, that’s not enough. They want my bandwidth too, and they don’t think I deserve attribution. That really pisses me off.
Yay! That rocks!
Revenge and free publicity. A match made in heaven…
Yay indeed!
I looked more at the site and it’s possible, I suppose, that the webmaster used one of those “template” programs to design it (including the custom graphic at the top of the page). I just can’t tell. It doesn’t look like any canned hold-your-hand template site I’ve ever seen, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be. (But they also use things like alt tags on the graphics—that’s not something that most newbies put in a website.)
I don’t know if I want to wait to email everyone or do it right away. The longer I wait, the more chance the webmaster will discover it and change it before anyone finds out. But then again, I really doubt the webmaster anticipates that I’d do what I’ve done, so he’s probably not checking the site all that often, nor updating it.
I would have done the furtive animated gif thing, but I’m too damned lazy this time. But it’s a very good idea.
I also decided that I needed to replace the graphic right away, to visually demonstrate to everyone that I could do it, just like that. I don’t think telling them that I could do it would be as effective as showing them. And hey—Angel is a worthy cause, so where’s the harm? 
I hope you documented everything before you made any changes, in case a technologically inept politician decides to accuse you of sabotage.
He can accuse me of any damned thing he likes, but I can’t possibly see how it will stick.
It’s my property that I am altering. My own unique property, residing on my bought-and-paid-for web hosting site. It’s my own private business what I do with my files, on my site.
Just because his site is leeching from my site doesn’t mean that he has any claim on what I do with my property on my site.
To complain or accuse me of anything would be similar to a shoplifter accusing the store of wrongdoing because the box of Crackerjacks they stole didn’t have a prize inside.
Papermache Prince, are you suggesting that anyone who makes changes to their own website should check to make sure that no one is stealing their content before they make said change? How do you prove that yosemitebabe even knew that someone else was using the image?
Haj
Yosemitebabe, I am both an Oregonian and a member of the media — copy editor/reporter at a smaller daily newspaper. I’d love to scoop the “Big O,” as the Oregonian is fondly known here.
We are also an Associated Press affiliate, and this is an election year, so interest is very high.
Could we be of help, here?