Tickling Salmon

As an artist in the digital age, you face a dilemma. You want people to see your work, and see it in sufficient detail that they can decide to buy it. On the other hand, you don’t want people people to steal your work — and you especially don’t want them to steal your work and sell it as their own (thanks to Chris Tyrell for passing on the story). But what can you do about it?

Many books talk about the importance of watermarking your images — embedding a copyright notice and your website directly in the picture so that if the image is stolen then your name goes along with it. That is nice in theory, but there are three problems:

1. I have never seen this done on any professional artist’s website.
2. It looks totally unprofessional (see point #1).
3. It doesn’t work.

Let’s talk about that last point. Consider the case of stolen T-Shirt designs, or the aforementioned stolen painting concepts. If you are a painter or graphic designer, then any other painter or graphic designer can look at your artwork (even a small web-sized version) and use their own skills to duplicate it — and they won’t duplicate your copyright statement. If you’re a photographer, you’re in the same situation. Any reasonably competent photoshop artist will edit out your copyright unless it covers so much of the image that the customer can’t evaluate your image.

So what can you do? You can use HTML tricks that make it harder for people download your images (i.e., by making it impossible to just drag them to the desktop). Unfortunately, the kind of people who are going to steal your work are almost certainly skilled enough to get around your blocks. You can try to get the pirate’s account closed down (and good luck with that; online store do not want to punish their clients). You can try to publicly humiliate or harass them them, which can get your account closed down. You can do all sorts of things that take up a lot of your time and have limited effect. I don’t like to come across as cynical… but ideas are very hard to protect and if the value of your work resides in a clever idea then you can and will be pirated. The best thing that you can do is work on your craftsmanship and make that craft evident in your work — so that your artwork contains so much labour value that a potential pirate looks for easier prey. And if you do sell T-Shirts? Change your designs frequently, so that you can get some original sales before the clones show up on the market. And try not to worry about it. The world is a big place and there are probably enough customers for you and the pirates. It’s not fair, but fair is one thing that life is not and never will be.

If you are a photographer or digital artist, however, there is one thing that you can do. You can make sure that whatever images you put online are so small that nobody can make a reasonable print from them. Limit the images to 600×900 or so (that’s 4″x6″ at 150dpi), and if you want to show the detail (which you might want to do if the artwork was shot on a 4×5 or 8×10 camera) you include a “detail” image that shows a small area of your artwork at higher resolution.

And pardon me while I step on a soap-box for a moment… If you are worried about people stealing your artwork, take a look at your computer. Got any pirated music or software? Go pay for it — musicians and programmers (and music studios and software companies) are in an even worse position than you, since they must provide a full-quality easily-duplicated digital copy of their work. You may not stop people from copying your own work, but at least when you complain about it you will be able to complain in good faith.