IceBlu said:
Thats the beauty of the internet. Its called etiquette. You should pay a visit to the art community to see how seriously things are taken.
But if you defer the burden of etiquette on people without an owner's manual to the Internet to figure that out for themselves, you're doomed to failure I'm afraid. You'll never get voluntary compliance that way. It's bad enough that many people won't even have an
awareness of that being an issue.
It's bad enough that we have some nations in SE Asia, just as an example, where copyright laws simply have no cultural resonance with the public. There you have folks selling every copied DVD and software CD imaginable for about the price of the blank disk itself. So it's a complete leap of blind, and dare I say even dumb, faith that you're going to get voluntary compliance for something that is put up on the Internet for worldwide distribution -- expecting the rest of the world to think that it should be somehow treated as personal or private.
Swag you mentioned something about a watermark. How am I going to use a Getty Images type watermark on my images ? how would i use them myself then ? The purpose isn't served. Its not that hard to get rid of a watermark either.
There are watermarking modules in many common graphical editing programs. If you don't want distribution but yet want to showcase your work, that's one way. If you want to show your work without making it too easy to allow others to copy it, there are other things you can do -- though less easy depending on where you post. Requiring HTTP referer headers to ensure that no one deep-links to your images for one. For another, you could host your images on a Web server that uses server headers to prevent people from saving the download -- such as mimicking what you get when you do a search on
www.imdb.com and try to save any of their photos from movie stills to your hard drive.
You're not going to prevent people from abuse. But it's better than trying to chase down and inform every potential Internet user about how you don't want your images distributed.
This has become a far bigger deal that I intended it to, but people involved in the digital-art scene will testify the annoyances associated with plagiarism.
Oh, it certainly is annoying. But the fact remains that the "digital-art scene" is grossly naive in thinking that posting up your artwork for all to see on the Internet isn't inviting unintended uses and consequences. And then crying foul -- often on many truly ignorant users -- is hardly a legitimate rebuttal if the rights holder does not take the appropriate steps to demonstrate intent of ownership and restriction of distribution.
I've even had my name erased from some of my stuff and I usually don't go head hunting. People who know me know that I'm a nice enough guy and I make stuff for people on request. Taking stuff without consent on the other hand bothers me.
It should bother you. But I think you're dooming yourself to more frustration and failure if you think that posting on random message boards is going to be anything but a joke of a deterrent. Though I know you did not intend it, your post comes off very hollow because of this. It's like asking people, "Please don't breathe my air." It obviously concerns you enough to start a new thread here to express your wishes.
Good luck, though. I know it's not a simple problem to have your digital art cake and eat it too.