Memorial Portrait of Nikki, English Bulldog

We have two bully new members of the PetsPictured.com pack, a pair of English Bulldog sisters from Ohio, whose portraits were commissioned by their mom Cynthia…
Sadly, poor sweet Nikki died of cancer at only two years of age. By the very nature of memorial portraits, photo selection was limited. Thankfully, one of Nikki’s photos had both a delightful cocked-head expression and soft indirect lighting. What a sweet face! She must be sorely missed.

Graphite portrait of Nikki’s sister Allie

Allie, Nikki’s sister, is still with her human family. Having the luxury of taking new photos, Allie’s mom kept snapping pictures, trying to capture one where Allie’s teeth weren’t showing. That never happened — those lower teeth are just part of Allie’s look! They stayed in her portrait.

Allie taught me a great tip to pass on to my clients trying to capture portrait-worthy photos: I wondered how they managed to get such wonderful lighting, combining the best of indirect and direct lighting. Here’s the secret: It was taken in the car!

Of course! Nice indirect light coming in from all sides eliminate deep shadows that hide details in sunlit photos. But the light is strongest from the window near Allie, so there is enough directional light to create highlights and shadows to create depth– the kind of 3-D shading that camera flash totally obliterates. What a lovely find!

I now recommend this trick to folks who are having a hard time taking well-lit photos without using the flash. Thanks for this bully new strategy, Allie!

Today is my Standard Poodle Rosie’s sixth birthday! I can’t believe she’s been with me so long. Wasn’t she just a puppy?

We just came back from the pet store where she picked out her own treats from bins that they conveniently locate at nose level! She’s definitely partial to those little fake bones filled with fake marrow. Then we bought a ball to replace her loved-to-death ball.

Tonight she gets a hotdog for dinner! I also thought I’d celebrate by posting a few of the many sketches and finished portaits I’ve done of Rosie, but I don’t think she’ll appreciate it as much as the hotdog.

Happy Birthday, my sweet Rosie O’Donley!

How do you celebrate your pet’s birthday?

A visitor to my booth last weekend asked a very interesting question: “When you draw, do you have to concentrate, or it is automatic for you?” I answered her then, but have continued to think about it since: Meta-thinking about thinking while drawing, I guess!

My answer to my visitor’s question:
I concentrate, thinking harder at critical points, like sketching in all the features; not as hard during more repetitive tasks, like texturing and shading. But its not verbal thinking: “Now its time to draw the eyes: first draw a circle for the pupil, then the iris, now the eyelid…” Rather, I think visually, following a line with my eyes while my hand tracks the same line on paper. I look for the shape of “empty space” between parts of a face. I compare the lightness and darkness of colors to match them with my shading pencil strokes. None of this happens with words, which often get in the way.

My thoughts since then:
I easily get totally absorbed in doing art, to the point of not being aware someone is talking to me. Or that several hours has passed.

When demonstrating drawing in front of a class, invariably my voice trails off partway through. It’s nearly impossible to maintain verbal communication while focusing [ahem] intently on producing art. Betty Edwards noted this phenomenon 25 years ago in her classic book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.

I’ve had entire classes of elementary kids go totally silent 15 minutes into a art lesson while working intently on their art. I’ve never been a subscriber to the “noisy artroom” philosophy, for the very reason that it’s impossible to focus, but never found it necessary to enforce silence if students were motivated and engaged.

Yet I enjoy listening to audiobooks and podcasts while working on my art, just as I enjoy listening when I drive. But when it comes time to do something tricky, like parallel parking or driving through an unfamiliar city, I turn off the audio, so I can concentrate.

Similarly, if I’m several hours into a drawing and things are going well as I repetitively build up texture and shading, I can listen in on a conversation and even mumble a few words. But for a full-fledged conversation, I have to stop — I can’t pay close attention to someone talking and drawing at the same time. No wonder — what’s the most important thing we do to show someone we’re listening? Make eye contact! Can’t do that while drawing!

What do you think about when drawing? Any chance of doing art on autopilot?

Last Saturday, I pitched my tent in the middle of Allegheny River Boulevard for my third outdoor art sales booth. The event was the Oakmont (PA) Chamber of Commerce’s Annual Street Sale.

I live a whole seven blocks away, so some of the typical pressures of setting up a booth sale were minimal: If I forgot something, I could run back home and get it. If my Subaru couldn’t hold all my stuff, I could ferry back and forth to schlepp it all “downstreet,” as we say in Pittsburgh.

Someday, this may get to be routine, rather than exhausting, but it sure isn’t yet! Undoubtably, that is partly due to being middle-aged and out-of-shape! ;-) But admittedly, it is also due to my constant experimenting with my goal and, consequently, my booth design. Am I trying to sell low-cost goodies featuring my art, a la sidewalk sale? Am I promoting my pet portraits and my PetsPictured.com Cafepress merchandise? Or should I promote myself as a portrait artist, who happens to enjoy portraying pets, as well as people?

After trying to do all of the above in one crowded 10×10-foot square — with marginal success — this time I tried marketing myself as “Susan Donley, Portrait Artist” to focus on the art. Instead of actively selling merchandise, I exhibited a sampling of my best portraits, demonstrated (graphite and scratchboard, visible on my easel on the right in the first photo above), and collected names for my mailing list. Plus, I “outted” myself as a portraitist of people.

Thanks to my Artbiz group, my family, Alyson B. Stanfield’s blog post on marketing art under your own name, and my local business coaches for the good ideas! Now we wait to see the results.

Jefferson Graham’s article “Attention to lighting can make a huge difference in your photos” yesterday in USAToday’s Tech section summarizes some great advice from Scott Kelby’s Digital Photography Book. (There’s also a video on this page of Graham showing how to get the best lighting for your photos in the summer sun.)

After sifting through hundreds of photos people send me as references for pet and people portraits, I couldn’t say it better than the headline of this article: If you want to vastly improve your people or pet shots, pay attention to lighting. Don’t just “Point and Shoot”, in spite of what the camera manufacturers say, instead: “Think, Look, Point, and Shoot”!

Among my Top Five Tips for Taking Portrait-Worthy Photos, two involve lighting: Turn off the flash and avoid direct sunlight by taking your subject in bright shade.

The USAToday article includes these among Scott Kelby’s five concise tips for improving your photography by improving the lighting. As far as portraits go, I’m not sure I agree with his tip “Shoot into the sun” though. Even when using fill-flash, this can be pretty tricky to pull off. Try it, for sure — backlighting can be very dramatic — but hedge your bet by taking some other shots in bright shade, which is a sure thing.

I have several of Scott Kelby’s many books (does the guy ever sleep?) on photography, Photoshop, and Mac OS X and I highly recommend them for their practical approach, clear instruction, and great tips spiced with humor. The books that were the source of USAToday’s advice are The Digital Photography Book and it’s companion The Digital Photography Book, Volume 2. More of Scott Kelby’s books here.

I’m not a photographer, but I offer a free email mini-course “Taking Portrait-Worthy Pet Photos” that offers tips I’ve learned the hard way by taking my own pet photos and depending on my client’s photos to draw and paint pet and human portraits. Free free to sign up and learn along with me!

The forecast on June 28 predicted rain all day with 60-70% chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon and evening. Perfect day for a booth at Maggie’s Organics Farm Festival, eh? ;-) Well, despite a lot wind on top of the mountain and in between several short downpours, it turned out to be a pretty nice day after all. Too bad the crowds listened to the weather forecast and (apparently) chose other ways to spend their Saturday!

It was nice to meet the other vendors, enjoy wonderful organic, vegan fare, and get a chance to work out in the fresh air. Here you can literally see over my shoulder the two pieces of art I demonstrated that day. On the top is a graphite portrait of mixed breed dog Smokey. On the bottom I’m beginning to engrave a Sun Conure (parrot) onto Claybord Black. It’s a technique in need of an image consultant: The usual term “Scratchboard,” unfortunately conjures up artwork rescued from the trash or elementary school art projects using crayon and tempera paint! The grown-up technique, however, allows tremendous detail and vibrant color. I’m just starting to work with it.

Stay tuned for some finished examples — I especially love doing birds this way.

Part 4 of an article written for Ann Kullberg’s From My Perspective colored pencil e-zine on my experiences with online theft of my drawings — and what I did about it. The full article is posted here in four parts:

1. Art Thieves in the Digital Age: The Changing Face of the Art Thief
2. Art Thieves in the Digital Age: My Tip of the Iceberg
3. Art Thieves in the Digital Age: Lessons Learned
4. Art Thieves in the Digital Age: Still Learning - Vigilance without Paranoia

Part 4: Still Learning: Vigilance without Paranoia

All three of the art theft cases I became aware of were brought to my attention by other alert souls, so I don’t have any surveillance secrets to share. Search engines are of little help, since they only pick up text and digital thieves obviously don’t post your name! Image searches on the subject portrayed may do better, but be prepared for a deluge of results when you search for something like “golden retriever” in Google Image Search (my search returned 779,000 images). There’s also a good chance that stolen images won’t show up unless our art thieves have bothered learning search engine optimization.

Between creating and marketing my art, I’m busy enough without spending hours tracking down thieves. Affordable digital tools to help us strike the balance between vigilance and paranoia would be nice. Digital watermarking services like Digimarc are a bit steep for my budget at the moment, but hold promise.

A few common technological solutions artists and photographers have tried are trivially easy to circumvent by anyone who knows how to take a screenshot. Right-click disablers (scripts that prevent users from right-clicking (control-click, Mac) on an image to access the “Save image as…” command) and embedding images in Flash-based animations and sideshows come to mind. If you know of other technology solutions to discourage Internet art theft, please speak up in the comments section on my blog.

Alarming, Late-Breaking News

I had hoped to end this article on a positive note, with advice my mentor, a gallery director pioneering the sale of fine crafts as art, gave artists whose work had been pirated by unscrupulous manufacturers 30 years ago: “An artist’s best defense is creativity – you can’t afford to fight them, so stay ahead of them with new designs and excellent craftsmanship.”

Unfortunately, since March 2008, when I accepted Ann Kullberg’s invitation to write this article for her online colored pencil magazine From My Perspective, alarming legislation has reached both houses of the U.S. Congress that could radically change copyright protections for artists. The so-called “Orphaned Works” amendments to current copyright law would allow free use of images whose copyright can’t be traced with “reasonable effort.” To keep from being “orphaned”, each image’s copyright would have to be registered, now an optional protective “upgrade” of the automatic copyright that exists from the moment a work is created.

This is ominous legislation for artists, authors, musicians, and all other crafters of creative original works. For up-to-date information and an excellent way to quickly send personalized email protests to your congressional representatives, I urge you to visit the Illustrators’ Partnership’s excellent website.

Let’s keep talking: What lessons have you learned?

With the legislative tide turning against artists and our fellow creative professionals, it is more important than ever to learn how to protect ourselves against those whose idea of “appreciating” art is to steal it.

I plan on posting strategies for tracking down, as well as “taking down,” art theft on my blog, so stop by occasionally if you are interested in this issue. Better yet…

Let’s continue this conversation publicly for the benefit of all artists. If you have learned lessons or developed strategies for protecting your artwork from online theft, please join me in this discussion below in the comments on my blog.

Previous installments of this article:

1. Art Thieves in the Digital Age: The Changing Face of the Art Thief
2. Art Thieves in the Digital Age: My Tip of the Iceberg
3. Art Thieves in the Digital Age: Lessons Learned

©2008 Susan K. Donley. All Rights Reserved.

Part 3 of an article written for Ann Kullberg’s From My Perspective colored pencil e-zine on my experiences with online theft of my drawings — and what I did about it. The full article is posted here in four parts:

1. Art Thieves in the Digital Age: The Changing Face of the Art Thief
2. Art Thieves in the Digital Age: My Tip of the Iceberg
3. Art Thieves in the Digital Age: Lessons Learned
4. Art Thieves in the Digital Age: Still Learning - Vigilance without Paranoia

Part 3: Lessons Learned

Unfortunately, I suspect these three instances are just the tip of the infringement iceberg, since they came to my attention without my even looking. But they were enough to get me started looking for ways to protect myself and pass on to other artists. However, I must admit that there is no way to fully protect ourselves, short of not putting our work on the Internet at all, which isn’t much of an answer if you need to promote your work (and who doesn’t?).

Lesson 1: Don’t expect the service providers to police their sites

For a few weeks, I kept monitoring Zazzle to be sure the same members didn’t repost my drawings after “the coast was clear.” Though these art thieves stopped using my drawings, they are still active Zazzle members, feathering their nests with artwork obviously done by a number of different artists, from the wide variety of styles represented. Since no credits are given, I sincerely doubt those artists either know or gave permission for the use of their work, any more than I did. Zazzle clearly doesn’t exercise their declared option to oust members found to be infringing. We artists are on our own.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which was passed in 1998 to update copyright protections, fair use, and liabilities to the new realities of digital publishing, tries to protect both free speech and the rights of copyright holders. Service providers like ISPs, blog hosts, Flickr, or Zazzle aren’t liable for copyright infringement by their users, however they must disable or delete (”take down”) any content they host when they are notified of an infringement occurring on their service.

The DMCA puts the burden of proof on the copyright holder to prove ownership — otherwise, the wonderful free-flow of information we know as the Internet would be hopelessly bogged down with intellectual property clearances. Even when alerted to serial copyright infringers (like the Flickr and Zazzle users who infringed others’ work, as well as mine), service providers apparently only take down the images someone has proven to them are infringed. In fact, the DMCA’s protection of free speech provides a reverse incentive for service providers to be pro-active, since their members can dispute a take-down notice not backed up with proof of infringement.

I’ve come to appreciate services like Cafepress.com, which posts clear intellectual property guidelines prominently on their image upload page and requires checking a box certifying that you are the copyright holder before uploading every image. They also publish an extensive Content Usage Policy, which is worth reading by anyone wanting to do the right thing by fellow creative artists (for example, those of us who use reference photographs or collage elements). Some providers bury such language in general terms of service, only show it once when the member initially signs up, or obscure it behind a link in the page footer.

Lesson 2: Know how to send a “Take-Down Notice”

The good news about the DMCA is that it provides clear recourse for digital theft, the “Take-Down Notice,” also known as a “Cease and Desist Order” by lawyers. If you find that your work is being used on the Internet without your permission, of course, you can approach the copyright infringer yourself to ask them to take it down. But if they don’t, you have no way to make them do it. On the other hand, their ISP or other service provider does have that “take down” ability and under the DMCA they must, if you provide proof that the infringed work is yours.

Look for a link to “Copyright Policy” or “Intellectual Property Policy” on the service provider’s web site, most likely in the footer of every page. It will give clear instructions (usually taken straight from the text of the DMCA) for sending a take-down notice, including what information to provide and to whom to send it.

The proof I provided was a link to the original web page displaying the drawing in question with its various copyright notices and a link to my separate copyright page (see below). You must also provide a link to the infringing material on their site.And don’t forget to take a screenshot, print out the web page, or save it as a PDF for your own records (on the Mac, you can “Save as PDF…” from the “Print” dialog box). Record the date and original URL of the page, since it may disappear shortly after you make your complaint.

Lesson 3: Be able to prove your work is yours

By law (at least for now!) any work is automatically copyrighted to its creator the moment it is completed, but you should take steps to prove to someone else that you own your work:

• Sign your physical work with a copyright notice. Though not technically required for copyright protection, as I learned from the t-shirt printer, it helps honest people get in touch with you. I sign “Susan K. Donley ©2008″ and make a point of making it legible.
• Keep good records for each work of art you create, when it was created, who it was sold to and copies of any commission or sales agreements that state that you retain copyright ownership.
• Use the dated copyright notice under each image on your web site or blog.
• Register your copyright for ultimate protection. Registration with US Copyright Office is necessary proof in courts if you ever need to sue. I confess that this is so daunting and expensive with a large body of work that I’ve yet to do it, but I definitely plan to.
• Consider watermarking larger images on the web with your copyright notice and domain name. This is controversial in the online art world – some say it is defacing your artwork with a distraction that screams to site visitors “I don’t trust you!” and can be easily removed in an image editor. These folks’ remedy is to limit web images to low-resolution images that aren’t suitable for printing. Unfortunately, my experience shows that the quality of low-resolution images is not a deterrent to thieves willing to put up with a little blur for the sake of freebies.

  On the other side are the watermarkers, often stock-image photographers, who screen a huge watermark onto the middle of an image to make it unusable. I’m in-between. I disagree that a watermark serves no purpose, since it is the only way I know to make sure my notice survives when my images appear out of context in Google or Yahoo’s image search, which my search engine logs tell me is my web site’s biggest referrer. So, I use a smaller, but unmistakable, watermark along the bottom of a 500×500 pixel image (I don’t bother on most thumbnails, like those I used in this article). I suspect it only deters honest people, since it is easily removed, but it is a compromise I can live with.

Lesson 4: Post prominent contact information and a copyright policy

Help the honest people and Good Samaritans find you! If I had had my phone number buried on my web site’s “Contact us” page, instead of prominently displaying it on every page, I doubt I would have heard from the printer in Quebec.

Link from every page to your copyright notice where you explain in plain langage what people may and may not do with the images of your artwork on your web site. My Flickr Good Samaritan took the time to look up this page on my site and referred the infringer to it, making clear that she was in the wrong. I also referred Flickr.com and Zazzle.com to my copyright policy page, as well the relevant originating pages in my Take-Down notices.

The next installment of this article is:

• Part 4: Art Thieves in the Digital Age: Still Learning - Vigilance without Paranoia

©2008 Susan K. Donley. All Rights Reserved.

Part 2 of an article written for Ann Kullberg’s From My Perspective colored pencil e-zine on my experiences with online theft of my drawings — and what I did about it. The full article is posted here in four parts:

1. Art Thieves in the Digital Age: The Changing Face of the Art Thief
2. Art Thieves in the Digital Age: My Tip of the Iceberg
3. Art Thieves in the Digital Age: Lessons Learned
4. Art Thieves in the Digital Age: Still Learning - Vigilance without Paranoia

Part 2: My Tip of the Iceberg

Apparently my pet portraits have become a tempting magnet for image searchers – who can resist puppies and kitties, right? Not a week goes by when I don’t get one or more requests to use my work for all kinds of purposes: charitable, commercial, and downright silly. These honest folks at least ask first. For inappropriate uses I simply say “no.” Others usually disappear when I explain that there is a licensing fee to use my art.

From the volume of honest folks who ask permission, I suspected many more just appropriate the images without asking and, of course, without my knowledge. Unfortunately, my suspicions were well-founded. This is my story of how I found out about at least three instances of infringement and what I did about them. Hopefully, some of my lessons learned will help other artists.

Digital Vandalism Reported by the “Neighborhood Watch”

The first infringement I became aware of appeared on the Flickr.com photo-sharing site, where I share my drawings with other artists and animal lovers. One day, I received an email from another Flickrite, whom I’d never met before, telling me that someone had taken my “Persian Cat” drawing from my website, altered it, and posted it on Flickr with her signature. She never bothered to remove my signature, apparently assuming that altering and publishing was OK. I hadn’t even posted this drawing on Flickr, but this kind whistle-blower noticed my signature and realized she had seen it on other drawings I’d posted. She went to my regular website, found the original there and emailed me.

This screen shot of the infringer’s page shows the garish color alterations she made and then had the nerve to sign! You can read what I wrote to her in the comments on this page to prove that the work was mine, explain why it was infringing, and demanding that she take it down.Meanwhile, I looked up Flickr/Yahoo’s “Copyright/IP Policy,” easily accessible from the bottom of each Yahoo-hosted page (Yahoo owns Flickr).

It gives very clear directions for reporting infringements and their policy to remove any infringed image under the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). I wrote the appropriate email to Yahoo’s Copyright Agent and within hours the vandalized “Persian Cat” had disappeared. I have no way of knowing if the infringer read my comment and removed it on her own or if Yahoo deleted it. Either way, no one contacted me except for Yahoo’s automatic “We’ve received your email…” message. OK, don’t expect an apology, I guess!

The infringer hasn’t stopped altering and reposting other people’s images, but she has learned at least to post a notice that her images are alterations of others’ work.

An Offline Infringement

Another Good Samaritan brought the next incident to my attention last December. The phone rang while I sat at my drawing table, furiously working on last-minute Christmas commissions. I almost didn’t answer it so I could keep working, but I was intrigued that the caller ID displayed “Quebec.” On the line was the owner of a business that prints custom t-shirts (I was told he does most of the official work for the World Wrestling Federation!). He explained that a customer had walked in with an ink-jet print of my Golden Retriever drawing from him to transfer to a t-shirt.

Luckily, this is a copyright-savvy businessman who pays licensing fees to the WWF, so he was suspicious. This time the infringer had erased my PetsPictured.com watermark, but neglected to erase my signature. The printer googled my name and “golden retriever” and up popped the infringed image, my drawing! That’s when he picked up the phone and called me to ask if I had given his customer permission to use the image. I assured him that I had not and thanked him profusely for taking such pains to get in touch with me.

Then he asked me if I was interested in licensing my work, as he often gets requests for certain breeds of pets on shirts. He usually uses royalty-free clip art, but liked my work better. I explained that I was interested in licensing my work eventually, but needed to do more research so … he finished my sentence “we both make money.” “Exactly,” I replied, “Since I need to make a living and don’t want my work to become just more clip art available anywhere.” We agreed to stay in touch and I thanked him again.

Zazzled

In March, my mother read a USAToday article about Zazzle.com, a print-on-demand competitor to Cafepress.com, where I have a shop featuring my pet portraits. Always on the look-out for ways to keep me out of the poorhouse (er, I mean, promote my artwork), my mom surfed over to Zazzle to see if they offered any advantages. Scoping out the competition, she put the names of a few popular dog breeds into their search box. Ouch – up popped products featuring my drawing! My mom emailed me immediately and, like only an offended mother can, set out with a vengeance to find out if other images had been stolen by systematically searching for every breed that I had posted on my site. Unfortunately, she discovered that several Zazzle members had helped themselves to my art!

This time, I was really angry! The previous two infringements could be construed as “fair use” by people not familiar with copyright law. But this was different: At Zazzle, people set up stores with merchandise whose main selling point was my work! They fully intended to profit from their enterprise without sharing the proceeds with me. It was outright theft! To add insult to injury, these thieves accepted rave comments left about the “cute pictures” as if they had done them!

This time, I knew what to look for and found Zazzle’s instructions for sending a “Take-Down Notice.” I angrily fired off the appropriate message to make them delete the work (preferably kick out the offending member) and reminded them than any profits from sales of the work rightly belonged to me (by the terms of the DMCA, not just common decency). I received the expected “we-aren’t-responsible, but we are deleting the product” canned email response from Zazzle. The products were deleted without apology, much less remuneration.

Then I suddenly remembered that, in my anger, I neglected to take screenshots of the offending Zazzle pages. After a moment of panic, I remembered that Google caches web pages, so I googled “zazzle [breed name] [zazzle-member-name]” and was able to track down cached pages for every one of the infringed images. Whew! That was a close call, because screenshots or print-outs are critical for proving infringement!

The next installment of this article is:

• Part 3: Art Thieves in the Digital Age: Lessons Learned

©2008 Susan K. Donley. All Rights Reserved.

Part 1 of an article written for Ann Kullberg’s From My Perspective colored pencil e-zine on my experiences with online theft of my drawings — and what I did about it. The full article is posted here in four parts:

1. Art Thieves in the Digital Age: The Changing Face of the Art Thief
2. Art Thieves in the Digital Age: My Tip of the Iceberg
3. Art Thieves in the Digital Age: Lessons Learned
4. Art Thieves in the Digital Age: Still Learning - Vigilance without Paranoia

Part 1: The Changing Face of the Art Thief

Twenty years ago, the words “art thief” brought to mind a stealthy figure dressed in black, breaking into museums, art galleries, or pricey houses to silently slit a canvas out of its frame and sneak away with the rolled masterpiece tucked under arm. That’s the Hollywood version anyway! Plenty of artists working in that era can also tell horror stories about their designs showing up in catalogs as cheap overseas knock-offs. This kind of theft never had the drama to make it to the screen, but was far more harmful in stealing the livelihood of working artists. Still, design thieves had to at least do a little work to track down suitable designs in galleries or paper publications.

Boy, have things changed for dishonest manufacturers now that finding good art is just a Google image search away! But that’s not the worst of the temptations the digital world offers. Now that nearly everyone has unprecedented access to art images, technology has made it possible for everyone to be a manufacturer, as well! Do a search, find an image, print it out on t-shirts, and give them to all my friends! Just erase that unsightly copyright notice in Photoshop (a job that would have required a darkroom and sophisticated airbrush skills 20 years ago).

In short, technology has given just about anyone — the honest and the dishonest — unprecedented access to art and the means to reproduce and publish it. The result is a host of art thieves operating in the open with no need to sneak around and dress in black! The honest thieves don’t know they are doing anything wrong. They believe anything on the Internet is “free” and don’t realize they are breaking the law by stealing someone’s artwork (AKA “infringing copyright”) in their projects. The dishonest thieves know better, but steal anyway, taking advantage of all the digital “safe-cracking” and “fencing” tools they can find.

Feeling paranoid? Me, too – and for good reason, as it turns out! In Part 2, I will tell about three times that I know of that my artwork was stolen from my website.