I just discovered my three most recent Drawing Life posts reproduced whole hog, without attribution or links, on a stupid blog site with a misspelled name. I suppose this is the risk we all take making content available on the internet, but let me take this opportunity to reassert and reinforce the copyright notice that appears at the top of the sidebar. The content here is not in the public domain. I, Fred Hatt, own it and I claim full copyright protection. That means all rights reserved. That means if you reproduce any of it without my express permission you are in violation of U.S. and international laws.
Digital technology makes it so easy to reproduce content that people do it without a thought. The world is changing for all of us who write or make images or music or movies, and we’re trying to adapt. But our content is all we do, and we depend on our ownership of it. If you like art or music or writing, you must respect those who create it. If you need content and can’t produce your own, there’s plenty of public domain and Creative Commons material available. The content on this blog is not free for the taking, and I will protect my ownership of it by any means necessary.
Copyright Fred Hatt. All rights reserved. Got it? I’ll be interested to see if they hijack this post too.
Update: I just checked the violating site and all of the above is already there, as soon as I posted it – automated theft. There will be no further posts here until I figure out how to stop it. If anybody can help, please let me know.
Another update: I checked again ten minutes later and all my content has been removed from their site. I guess they got my emails. I’d still like to find out how to prevent automated content theft, so please contact me if you have special knowledge.
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Seems to me that the only thing you can do is stick an ugly copyright mark across the works – much as they do on DeviantArt.com.
It is a shame that things have come to this, as you say, it’s a sign of what technology can do, either as a conscious or unconscious act.
I, for one, sincerely hope that avenues of some kind remain to allow us to continue to view your work (now I’ve found you).
I may have to start doing that. I do put my name in all the filenames and copyright notices on the sites, and keep the online images small enough they won’t make a good print. I don’t really mind if someone republishes a limited number of images as long as they are properly attributed and link back to my site, but this incident was wholesale automated theft. They’d set up their blog to hijack my entire posts, all text and images, and present it as their own. There should be technical security measures I can take to prevent roboplagiarism. That’s what I’m looking for.
That’s such BULLSHIT!
No protection is perfect,as she said a month after that magical night…
-but Fred, I suspect your name and style recognition protect your works far better than the © 2009.
However I did find this site that may help: http://www.copyscape.com/
I’m not recommending it, just passing the info along.
Regards;
Jim
It’s a lousy, annoying situation to be sure. Fred, I hope you find an effective protection in which you can avoid having to use those watermarks. Like Geoff said, they are ugly! They would especially spoil the look of your art given the colorful, dynamic style of your drawings.
Thanks everyone for your comments and suggestions. I got an email back from the site that was hijacking my posts. It just said “Content removed”. I guess you have to be eternally vigilant. Jim, I’ll check out the site you linked.
Hi Fred,
I’ve come across this – which might give a few clues …
http://forums.about.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?tsn=3&nav=messages&webtag=ab-webdesign&tid=9127
Some interesting ideas there, Geoff. I’m not so concerned about right-click saving. I myself save images I like in a clippings file. I would be concerned with someone reposting my content as their own, downloading it wholesale, using it without attribution, or using it for any commercial purpose.
At one point I had a picture I’d taken of a famous person on my Flickr page, and someone mailed that famous person a print to autograph, a print of my photo they had purchased from someone, not me, who was printing it without my permission or knowledge. The problem there was the originals I posted were high enough resolution to make a good 8 x 10 inch print. I disabled the “all sizes” option so people can only access the display sized images.
Jim, that “Copyscape” looks like an excellent tool. It searches the web for exactly the kind of copy that happened in this instance. It worked, too – found the same site I found, and fortunately no others. I’ll definitely bookmark and use this tool on a regular basis. Thanks much.
Glad it helped.
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