Heard from Annelein Beukenkamp, in Vermont, today that her artwork was "stolen" by somebody and turned into a calendar that a company in Canada is selling! How rotten!! This makes artist number five or six who has had their art "stolen". Jean Haines of Watercolours with Life in England realized that someone was copying her fabulous paintings of racehorses and selling the finished paintings as if they were their own originals...........Jean was forced to take all of her racehorse paintings off of the internet so that it couldn't happen again. How rotten!! A crazy friend (and I say that with admiration) who writes "Flourish in Progress", Elizabeth Jayne Liu, had her whole total blog stolen by a man who would just copy her blog and post it under his name.........she googled something on her blog one day, trying to find out if there more of that cartoon or item and instead found her whole blog!
With the internet so available I guess anyone who wants to be lazy and cheat and not do their own homework, or painting, or research, or............can just steal from other people. I'm not sure how anyone can truly protect their work. We've all been so generous showing our work not thinking for a second that somebody would copy it and sell it.
Perhaps we all need to put big "copyright" signs on top of the work as it's displayed - but then all of us are being punished for the few horrible thieves out there.
It's sad but it sure does happen and I'll bet a whole lot more than we'll ever know. Embedding a digimark might give a little hope but probably not enough.
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