Russian Site With Stolen Art Works on..

I also received a mail from Avy and came to know she saw an old work of mines there,
it could only have been stolen from SB ´cause i only posted that work here,i´ll do the
same as you Auline,thanks for the links

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Thanks for reading this saretta and Mr Uvah, hope it helps you both

I wrote my mail yesterday and my 28 works are still up. The site had been taken off line a couple of weeks ago because of massive complaints about copyright infringement. But now a lot of the works that were deleted have been resubmitted again.
I had my images removed from at least 7 different russian sites in the last weeks, not only artfile...........and it was no problem, most site owners showed very cooperative and even apologized. The thing is that the images spread very quickly once they are shown on one site, and to think one could avoid or even stop that happening would be an endless battle.........the day only has 24 hours.

I have spent hours and hours on various russian sites and spotted a lot of images I know who the artist is............like Serge, Richard, Sally and hell of a lot of stuff weboso made. Also Vladstudios and many more I know from other sites.
Please be aware that you cannot fight this!!!!!!!!!!!! If you are not careful, you will start getting paranoid about it. If you find your works, try and write a mail to the admin, but don´t let it worry you too much. In most cases the people are not bad, they simply do not have such strict laws in russia, and they think they are not doing anything illegal as long as they don´t use the works commercially.

First I was furious about all this, it didn´t do me very good though. Whatever you think or do, just remember that if you don´t want this to happen..........don´t submit your images in the first place. There is no alternative in my opinion, although I still think that some site owners could do a bit more to protect their artists.

Take care everyone.........miss you all!

You are absolutely right... posting work does come with risk of this nature. So, if I understand this correctly - people are posting these works on the Russian site as their own?

I can speak for myself though luckily i only found one rip,Poppies,the false author is Kattrin,i saw many works from Antje there,it´s really a shame that nobody cares to protect autors´works!!

Fred,
they don´t say that it is their own, but they neither tell anybody who the origin artist is. A lot of artists do not bother with signing their works visibly for they seem to think it spoils the art or simply don´t care about their copyrights. Some even feel flattered that their works were worth stealing which I personally find naive, because one site with a massive amount of rips even offered prints of the stolen images. Two weeks ago I found one of my earlier 3D renders on which the signature had been removed. That is why I started to put the title and my full name on my images..........right in the middle where it can´t be removed that easily. But as I said earlier, the ones that were signed down the right bottom are still flying around the net and are continiously spreading, because there are such a lot of sites.

The people who submit rips are so mad about it, they do not even notice that they submit the same work three, four or even more times. Artfile.ru has a lot of categories.............photography, 3D, Fractal, Aviation........you name it, it will be there. And each category contains thousands of stolen images.

OK... now I got the whole picture. I don´t understand what sense of accomplishment a so-called artist can get from posting a work that was done by another. That is one that I´ll never understand. But I am an honest soul... always will be.

Well Fred,to tell the truth i also didn´t understand, i ended up doubting those artists phisically exist ,looking at this from a commercial point of view,those sites are full of banners aka:the more visits the site gets more clicks on the featured commercials...

sorry it was,"the more clicks on the featured commercials" and i add...there are lots of "happy"ladies on those banners

Very true, Sara!
And if you look at it from that point of view, the site owner actually makes profit with all those stolen images. As for the "Happy" ladies.............sex sells.........always has done and always will do, and all those adverts hit just the right target group, don´t they?

Thank goodness there are Firefox-addons like AdBlock Plus (which is free, of course). I have eliminated them all before I started searching.


Fred,
they do not claim to be artists, but they do seem to get points or ranks for posting images that get downloaded a lot.

What Nr. Uvah said, is also very true ! Everyone who goes there should make sure to delete their temps and cookies and scan their system with adaware or spybot or similar afterwards!

You can embed a digital watermark in your art. You can also add a visible watermark over the main part of the image that is translucent. This will discourage anybody trying to improperly use your images. I personally do not like to use the visible watermarks,but it´s an effective deterrent.

Hi Etype, my were all watermarked with my copyright image under a transparent layer, in fact on two of them it´s still on and the third image as been cropped to remove it.

For my photos I simply put my name on the bottom right or left corner that I realize could easily be cropped or masked with the use of software. Sounds to me the unfortunate reality is that the only way to prevent it would be to "plaster" your name or watermark in selective areas all over the image. This of course would make it less desirable for a legitimate user to have it on their desktop. So, it is probably not a feasible or realistic fix to the problem. But it would stop theft. That is a safe bet. It would also make the work less popular or desirable. Its damned if you do, damned if you don´t...