Dear Denizens of Live Journal

Lend me your votes.

I am at the bottom of the LJ Idol polls this week. I would like to be able to post on the topic next week.

And contrary to rumors I posted last week, you do not need to be left handed to vote. So righties lets get in there and get me out of the basement.

Vote Here for MEEEEEEEEE! *grin*

I was going to say or the Adipose gets it but since there are such mixed feelings about them I won't.

Oh this week was about what they say about ME! All about MEEEEE

Imagine That

You are an artist that does a lot of social commentary in rather irreverent ways. You are walking long on the street and you see an image that you created in reverse with the phrase you attached to the piece underneath. You politely stop the person and ask where they had gotten it. They tell you one of those hip chain stores that is very popular with the teen set. You go to the one in your local mall and see that shirt being sold for $24.95 and according to the manager it is one of their better selling ones. You write corporate and very politely explain the problem with the t-shirt. They inform you that it is not their fault since they bought it from this vendor so you need to take it up with them. The vendor says that they bought the image from this artist and they will stop making the t-shirt since it is apparent that you did create the image but if you want money you have to go after the artist of the image they did use. So they get to keep the money that they earned so far off of your work and you have to go after someone who doesn't have much money and it would cost you more than you earn to sue the guy for not much return.

You have your art out on the net. You are on one of the more popular sites for artists to post. You have a following of artists and others who watch for your new work. You know enough to carefully watermark the work and put a "don't not use for anything or even copy from this site" notice with each and every piece. You have done everything you can think of to protect your work. One of your watchers informs you that they saw a poster of your work in their city. They send you a cell phone picture of it. After a little digging you find out that a student at a local high school won a city-wide contest with a painting that is your work down to the detail of the number of circles in the hair. He has gotten much more acclaim and public notice than you ever got for your personal work. You have to then set about to prove that this kid ripped you off. He claims that a buddy gave him the idea and he copied that. There is no money to be had here but your work after all that careful wording to avoid this sort of thing has been taken away by from you by a kid.

You are an artist that works in rather difficult natural mediums. Your work is known on sight and sells for a decent amount of money for the originals. You are informed of someone else who is coming doggone close to doing copies of your work onto similar forms of mediums. However they are not selling originals but what is the equivalent of a color Xerox of their work. You know you don't have a copyright on your medium choices and there are no direct rip-offs of your work just close enough to keep it legal and confuse some potential buyers or past buyers of your original work.

I had an artist friend once tell me that you made it when they keep trying to rip you off or copy you. Because then you know you did something that was attractive to someone else's eye. With the Internet, getting your art work out there for others to see is so much easier but it is also easier for someone to decide that since you put it out in public that they have the right to take it for either their own personal use (less bothersome) or for commercial gain (very bothersome).

The music-sharing problem has been beaten to death, resurrected, and beaten to death again. The industry used its clout to get the idea across of what was right and wrong and had laws made to protect themselves. The problem for the artists is that most of them don't have that sort of clout to protect themselves. So they do what they can and use the existing laws to try to protect themselves and their work.

I know everyone reading this is not guilty of art theft. I do think we need to find a way of informing the Internet denizens that taking someone's art is wrong like they know taking music is wrong. (And yes I do know that a lot of people do it anyway. There are always going to be those who think they are entitled to whatever they want.) There are a number of artist groups that are working towards that goal. I know of a group of doll artists that are trying to educate the public as to what is allowed and not allowed and doing a pretty good job of it without screaming at people. I have to agree with one friend who said that we need to educate the children about what is theft on the Internet so maybe by the next generation this will not be as big a problem as it is becoming now.

It's a problem that I don't have a solution for but I wanted to put it out there for people to be more aware of.

(Note: I changed some of the circumstances on my examples so it is no one specific but each is based on something I have seen happen.)

I am grateful for people who respect the artist's rights.