online art pirates

Copyright infringement is a problem for any artist, visual or otherwise. With the discussions of "fair sharing" aside, there are countless cases where an artists' work is distributed, either for profit or not, without the artist's permission. Unless the artist has waived their copyrights to a work or released a work under a non-traditional license (e.g. a Creative Commons license) they are automatically granted full copyrights (at least in North America---I am not familiar with copyright laws in other countries) and therefore the distribution of the work without permission is a crime and potentially impacts the artist's income.

The internet has become a wonderful place for art pirates (and many other pirates). Art can be sold quickly and with relative anonymity through online auctions and even websites created primarily for this purpose. For example, the website www.arch-world.com enjoyed some quiet notoriety for selling artists' work without permission (for more information: http://www.painterskeys.com/clickbacks/arch-world/chinese-list.asp; arch-world.com seems to have been inactive since March 2006). Another known outlet for pirated artwork is http://stores.ebay.com/GalerieKunstvoll, which was reported here.

The unfortunate reality about fighting copyright infringement is that it is the creator's responsibility to locate and identify their work. This is easier for writers, who are able to search for excerpts of their writing online. For visual-artists, however, finding their artwork is a needle-in-a-haystack situation...especially if the pirates are smart enough to not attribute the work to the artist. Most of the time, artists rely on others telling them that their work was seen somewhere.

Having offending work removed can be quite easy or difficult depending on the website/company with which you are dealing. Most high-profile online communities and auction websites have strict policies on the removal of copyrighted work. Others, however, have more red tape and contacting a real person is quite a baffling process. If the artwork is found on a website created by the fraudster, you may have to go to their website host to shut them down---and even then, you may be in for some difficulty if the website is hosted in a country with different laws than your own.

How to protect yourself from copyright infringement

This is actually quite difficult with what computers can do these days. Here are some tips to minimize copyright infringement:

If you post photos of your work online, use a lower resolution (75 dpi or lower is suggested) so that when the image is printed the quality is quite poor.
Put a watermark or logo on your pictures in a prominent spot.
Sadly, things such as disabiling a web browser from being able to save your images by right-clicking will frustrate visitors who want to do something as innocent as sending your image to a potential client but not discourage someone trying to steal your images. The location of the image can be found by looking at the source of your webpage, and failing that a screenshot can be taken of your webpage and pasted into a graphic editing program.
Join a copyright collective and/or retain the services of a lawyer so that they can take care of business while you take care of creating art. If you are represented by a gallery and/or agent, find out whether they will assist you with copyright issues.

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