How to Protect Your Art From Online Theft

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Yesterday I told you all about my experience finding out my art was stolen, and placed onto other websites, without any credit to me.

I went through a step by step tutorial and tips on how to use Google Search  to look for other places where your art is posted online.

 

You may go here to find this useful tutorial:

How to Check if Your Art is Copied or Stolen With Google Image Search

 

 

Well, after that, I decided to go through some measures to help protect my art. These are some things you can do to deter people from stealing your artworks.

 

7 Useful Methods to Stop Copy Theft of Art

 

Before I begin, I should say that there are no ways that I know of that will absolutely protect you from people taking your art.

Online thieves always find tricks to by-pass the following methods. But, after using some of these techniques, you can certainly feel much safer about promoting and marketing art online, and feel confident that most likely your art will not be taken.

 

1. Use right-click protection

   As you know, it is so easy at most websites to just right-click, copy and paste. This function can be disabled with some javascript code. Also, some sites offer this feature to their members.
   
   

2. Watermarking your artworks

   There are many online gallery sites and image services that offer watermarking services right on the site. You may avail of these or choose to watermark all your artworks with Photoshop or a similar software.
   
   

3. Using flash for your art image

   After converting images to flash, it is impossible to just copy and paste.
   
   

4. Cutting the image into pieces with a photo editor

   Placing all the pieces on your website or blog, and making them appear as one will certainly deter most from going through the trouble of piecing them back together.
   
   

5. Cloaking the artwork

   If you have some knowledge of html and css, you can place a transparent gif right on top of the artwork. That way, when someone tries to copy and paste, they simply download a transparent image file.
   
   

6. Place your name, website name, or copyright notice on your art

   Some artists do not like doing this because they think it interferes with the composition.
   But if used sparingly, the artwork will look presentable. Artists may want to have three copies of their artworks:
   
   
   • One that has a copyright notice or name.
     
   • Another that has a low resolution, for displaying in places where you are more confident about, such as a blog.
     
   • The original best quality image for uploading to places where artists make their work available for prints.
   
   
   

7. Have small, low resolution images

   Some online gallery websites already have this feature built in. They automatically create a lower resolution image to be displayed on the website, and only make the high quality one available for printing purposes.
    

If after following these tips to protect your art you still do not feel safe, then the best advice I can give is to remove your art from any place online you are wary of.

There are certain large online gallery websites where I hear a lot of stealing goes on (Deviantart), so you may want to either add extra copy protection at these places, or remove them all together.

 

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and advice for protecting your online art from being copied, and that you feel a lot safer about promoting artworks online.

 

To help all of you, in my next list of Online Gallery Sites I will list certain features, such as:

• If they have disabled the ability to right-click.
• Whether the online gallery has watermarking services.
• The size of the images that are displayed on the website.

 

Portrait drawings by Graham Matthews

If you are interested in seeing what I have been up to regarding portraits, please visit…

Reflection Portrait Drawing

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