A couple weeks ago we wrote a post on how preventing people from taking pictures of your creations for copyright protection was potentially more harmful then good for business. Shortly after the post was published Laura Iverson of Zen Breeze Art wrote to us about her own experience with copyright theft. Laura had a really bad experience with some sweatshop art imitators who copied her art designs from the gallery images of her ebay shop and resold low resolution blow ups of them in their own shop. Here's Laura's account of the nightmare turned reality:
After that, I started putting a watermark across my images, figuring
that the sweatshops would then have to paint their bad copies, rather
than using my images. They did just that:
http://zenbreeze.com/images/stolencats.gif
My originals were selling between $300 - $800. They were featuring a
set of 4 for a fixed price of $60. I got the listing pulled (I have
no idea how long it had been going on, however, or how many sets they
sold). I don't know how many more there are. There are so many art
listings on eBay. If found, you can get the listing pulled but eBay
won't ban the seller and, in most cases, the procedure to pull the
listing takes so long that it's already ended.
My sales never recovered on eBay and, since then, I've been trying to
find a viable online venue. Many of my colleagues have had to find
other employment. It's really sad."
I wanted to share Laura's story to represent the devils advocate on this issue, clearly it isn't quite as simple as "the more pictures they take the more business we'll do!". It also doesn't appear to be as easy as preventing people from photographing your work.. if we tried to block those attempts no one would be posting pictures of their art on the web. This does serve as a warning to keep your eyes open for art imitators, sure imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, but in this case flattering may not fix the damage that can be done.
Protect yourselves folks, it could be as simple as grabbing an email address from the person taking pictures of your work - after-all they most likely do like your art and there should be nothing wrong with having a way to keep in touch.
If anyone else has a similar story or a testament to the kind of synchronicity that takes a random photo at an art fair and has it turn into a sale of your art down the road - share it with us.
Comments (1)
Thank you for getting the word out about this serious issue. I can't express my gut reaction of seeing my work (which is very personal to an artist) degraded in this manner. It is about so much more than financial loss, although that has been considerable.
To me, the only answer is for venues, such as eBay, to do more to stop this. Just pulling the listings after the fact is not an effective deterrant. It hurts their business, as well as ours.
Posted by Laura | July 11, 2007 10:21 AM
Posted on July 11, 2007 10:21