Part III; Art Thieves Exposed!

Finally, we come to the last installment on copyright violators; the naming names part.

My encounters with art thieves have been varied.

The first happened a few years after I designed a logo for my husband's business. Amazingly, an unrelated business just down the road adopted the graphic portion of the logo and used it in promotional materials and a magazine ad for their business. The business and the magazine got a Cease and Desist letter from our attorney. No more ads appeared.

One of my images appeared on charms being sold on ebay. I submitted a Vero form.

A visitor at a horse expo told me that she had found another artist down in Ohio who had copied one of my images. Unfortunately she couldn't remember the artist's name.

A needlepoint dealer had taken one of my images (and one from an artist friend of mine) and turned it into a needlepoint pattern and was selling it. We notified her web host and then her. She removed it and promised to destroy the pattern. Amazingly, on her needlepoint blog, she makes a big deal out of not taking images without permission, so it's obvious that she knew better but didn't think she'd be caught.

Just last month, we found a website that was offering clip art horse images that included one of my images and another artist's. Before I could notify him, he removed my image and a few others. Obviously HE knew which images he didn't have the rights to.

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled onto this artist's website who had copied one of my drawings. Notice that he even admits to having copied drawings from websites! As a musician, he should know better.

And, finally, there have been several encounters with kids. In the two cases below, they were exposed by others who recognized my artwork or recognized that the child had not done all that artwork herself. I figure that this negative exposure on the internet is a lesson learned that these kids won't forget. And, hopefully, it will wise up other kids to not do the same. Take a look;

Lauren Shelley Dreamer

Lauren Shelley Little Inspector

Youtube video Dreamer

You may wonder how we artists ever find our own work that's been stolen, given the vastness of the internet. Well, for one thing, the equine art community watches out for each other. Most of us are familiar with each other's work and notify each other if we find an image somewhere that we don't think it should be. We also have a formal online group that acts as a watchdog for equine artists and photographers, The Equine Arts Protection League. Many thieves have been exposed through member efforts, especially on ebay. I've also found several just by checking my stats and looking at the search results. The image search results are really helpful in turning up copies of my artwork, such as the pencilweb one above.

So far as I know, the Chinese haven't yet deemed any of my artwork attractive enough to copy. I don't know whether to be insulted by that or grateful. Grateful is probably the best choice for now.

Part I; A Primer On Copyrights

Something we artists battle continuously on the internet is the problem of people taking our images and using them for their own purposes. There seems to be this widespread belief that if an image is on the internet, it's copyright free. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Amazingly, this belief is held by artists as well as non artists!

Let me spell out the most important facts for everyone to understand about copyright law.

1. A WORK OF ART IS PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT FROM THE MOMENT OF CREATION.

2. THERE DOES NOT HAVE TO BE A COPYRIGHT NOTICE ON THE ARTWORK FOR IT TO BE PROTECTED.

3. THE ARTWORK DOES NOT HAVE TO BE REGISTERED WITH THE COPYRIGHT OFFICE TO BE PROTECTED.

4. THERE IS NO PERMISSIBLE PERCENTAGE OF AN ARTWORK THAT CAN BE COPIED WITHOUT INFRINGING ON THE ARTIST'S RIGHTS.

If you don't know anything else about copyright law, know these four facts.

How do these facts translate into everyday living?

They mean that my artwork is protected by copyright from the moment that I make a mark on a sheet of paper or canvas. If you want to paste my painting onto your website to decorate it, you have to ask my permission. If you want to copy my drawing, you have to ask permission, and you cannot claim that your copy is your own original work of art. It is not; it is a copy. If you want to use one of my note cards to decoupage onto a wooden box, you have to ask permission. If you want to use one of my paintings on t shirts and sell them, you must ask for a licensing contract for the right to do so. I will rent to you the right to use that image on specific merchandise for a specific period of time, and in return you will pay me a royalty for the right to do so.

There is a fifth point about copyright that is important to remember.

5. ALWAYS, ALWAYS ASSUME THAT AN IMAGE IS PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT NO MATTER WHERE YOU FIND IT.

See numbers one and two above. The only works of art that are not protected by copyright are those that have fallen into the PUBLIC DOMAIN.

There are also misconceptions about what is the PUBLIC DOMAIN. It is NOT artwork that contains no copyright notice or signature. It is NOT artwork that appears on the internet. It is NOT artwork and photos that you find displayed in Facebook or MySpace or on Webshots or Smugmug or any other photo display site.

Artwork in the PUBLIC DOMAIN is artwork whose copyrights have expired or whose copyright holders have released it into the PUBLIC DOMAIN. You can assume these days that a copyright has expired only after the artist has been dead for 70 years. That would mean that any artist who died after 1938 would still have valid copyrights held by his or her heirs.

And finally, one last point to remember which has to do with your own copyrights.

6. COPYRIGHT APPLIES TO PERSONAL PHOTOS AND ARTWORK AS WELL AS PROFESSIONAL PHOTOS AND ARTWORK.

This means that all of your family photos that you post on the internet and all of your writings are also protected by copyright. No one else may use them or display them without your permission.

Be aware of your rights, and respect the rights of others. Ask permission!

A Case of the What Ifs

The other day I got the bug to "do something" with my website. It started out innocently enough. I was just going to get rid of some broken links to a stats program I'd tried a few years ago and do a few other little maintenance things but then got a case of the What Ifs. That's always dangerous and sure to lead you astray from whatever urgent project is on the schedule for that day.

I've been wanting to redo my website for a long time but just couldn't spare the time to learn Deamweaver and do a proper job of it. I'm still stuck in the Dark Ages of website design, you see, with my wimpy little Home Page WYSIWYG program that only runs in OS 9, so my options are currently very limited, along with my knowledge of all the new cool stuff for making a website look sophisticated and professional.

At any rate, when the What If's struck I wondered What If I changed the table color to white instead of the teal green (that I love) in order to give the website a fresher, brighter look. So I did it. Hours and hours later, I had completely redesigned the Horse Paintings page and a couple of others and stumbled off to bed.

Of course, this morning the new design didn't look as hot as it had yesterday, and of course I couldn't leave it that way without trying out a few other What If ideas. So I did.

I think I'm happy with it now. For the time being. Until the What Ifs strike again. The main pages are done, and with the new design set, I can revise the rest of the pages one or two at a time. It's not fancy; it still looks kind of old fashioned by today's standards, but it will do until I can learn Dreamweaver.

Here is the Horse Paintings page newly spiffed up for the world to see. I hope.

Today's image is one I took at the Horse Shows By The Bay Dressage Show in Traverse City last summer. It's a definite future painting, and on a cold, blustery day in March, it reminds me of how hot and dusty it was that August day.

I'm a Little Rusty

Okay, I admit it; I'm not nearly as skilled when I draw freehand as I am when I have a reference to refer to. That was brought home to me last night when I did a little sketching while watching TV. The horse started out as a Friesian head and neck study which grew to the whole body except that - OOPS - I ran out of paper. It definitely didn't match the expressive flowing image I had in my head. Or, maybe the image in my head wasn't formed enough to come out well on paper. You'll notice that it strongly resembles my painting, "Forever Friesian" for which I had good photo reference. I've been thinking of redoing this image with improvements and a landscape background, and this was supposed to be an exploratory sketch for that. Clearly, it needs to go back to the drawing board.

The other sketch is supposed to be a wolf, but it looks more like a wolf dog cross or a longhaired German Shepherd. As a former German Shepherd owner, I can definitely see the Shepherd influence in this animal's "breeding". I have a few wolf books and some wolf calendars and need to spend some time sketching from those images to get a better feel for the wolf form before I try to create a real drawing or painting.

Yes, I realize that there's the whole copyright infringement issue, but if I use these materials to study and learn from ONLY and don't claim the resulting images as my own or try to sell them, it's perfectly permissible. That's how artists have learned for centuries, in fact, by copying the masters who came before them. Any art I do from these materials will remain hidden in my studio for my eyes only.

When I was a kid, I sketched from my mind and rarely directly copied. At least that's the way I remember it. Maybe I did more copying than I remember, but I drew constantly and got pretty good for my age from all the practice and exploration. I have a box full of old art to prove it, too. Clearly, I need to do more of that again; either working from memory and imagination or by working from life. That's why one of my goals for this year is to fill a sketchbook by year's end.

My training in illustration in art school taught me to work from photos, and creating pet portraits certainly demanded that level of accuracy be attained. But in recent years I came to face the fact that I'd become too dependent on photos. It's time to break free and go back to sketching and creating just for the joy that it brings without any thought to "will it sell?" or "is it good?"

So, here for the world to see are my first rusty attempts at freehand sketching in quite some time. I hope you enjoy them for what they are; nothing more than practice sketches.