How to Locate Your Plagerized Art, Music, and Writing Online.

Some people will take and use your work, but labor under the impression that if an artist is credited, its all right. This is a relative issue. For instance your image reproduced as a low res thumbnail on a private Myspace or Facebook page, and which includes your name and maybe link, is a minor issue. Personally, I don't mind and even appreciate the advertisement. Others, however, include your name if they think it will sell the pirated image. My own pirated art has been displayed on photo sharing sites under several women's names, but retained my last name tucked away in a long list of keywords and tags. Recently,AllPosters began selling a famous fantasy artist's posters and using her name as the selling point. Yet I know for a fact, from talking with her, this artist doesn't receive a dime because the actual printing is done in China, which doesn't honor copyright or patents. The company marketing them is based in Canada -there's a 7 year wait before this case gets into court in Canada, and meanwhile the thief can market the art and retain the profits. AllPosters buys from this supplier in a drop - ship arrangement, meaning that they forward the invoice to the Canadian company for fulfillment, but process the payment and billing.

Most of the time, people who suspect or know what they are doing is questionable will remove your name and also the copyright watermark (easily accomplished by removing one line of code), cropping it off, or disguising it. So how to find your material? I suggest a sweep every few months. Its not a big deal, just routine maintenance, and can be done late at night or while watching a movie. The following link takes you to a site explaining how to do a search for pirated creative material. The paragraph outlining how to conduct an efficient search for your art once your name and watermark is removed is about midway down the article.

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/stopping-internet-plagiarism/1-how-to-find-plagiarism/

BEING LAW AND TECH SAVVY

My attorneys had an IT grad visit my sites which include RedBubble and Fine Art America. In minutes they downloaded the 'protected' images, removed one line in the code through photoshop and produced a beautiful, fully printable image. Its so easy that they told ME how to do it and said using this these sites is akin to putting our art on street corner table marked 'free', any body who's taken a seminar knows how to do it. This will severely weaken our position in any lawsuit because its called 'officious intermeddling" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Officious_intermeddler As artists we have to make an obvious effort to protect our images and handing out free files that any college student ( or analog dinosaur like me) can swipe doesn't fall into that category. This term means I put my work where many people can access it with a minimum of effort, in a very public place, then complain and seek damages when its taken. Like leaving the garage door up, house unlocked, advertising you'll be out of town on vacation, then coming home to a robbed house and wanting to collect insurance damages. So I've already culled many pieces from FAA and RB this morning and in the end may have only a half dozen with the notice people visit my site to see more. I do want to be paid for what's sold this month! The studio printing my s/n gicless now has comparable prices so Ill use him for low cost prints and process orders via Paypal or a shopping cart. The IIT associate said he'll develop a poison pill virus for my art (it wont work with the way FAA and RB use files since what you see is the actual file they use to print with). It can do whatever I want it to and is embedded in the files themselves and cannot be detected or removed. It can serve as a beacon so I can locate my images wherever they are used, close down the person's monitor every time they try to copy an image, freeze their screen so that they have to reboot.

This experience is a great exercise in purifying our art. Why do we paint, how to share it yet protect ourselves - and still keep the heart and spirit pure, not wrapped up in commerce? And for us illustrators and graphic artists, how to promote our work and earn a living, yet minimize damage and protect our inventory and intellectual property?