Protecting Artwork Copyrights, Think again!!

Years ago before the days of the digital media, there was a long debate between artists on how to protect artwork from being stolen and how to save the artwork copyrights. It was and still a serious dilemma up to now that every artist need to reach a solution for it.
There were some techniques and regulations to save the artwork copyrights such as registering the artwork in copyright offices, adding a signature and hidden marks.

Artwork Copyrights in the Digital Life

Through the years and getting into the digital life, this problem has not yet been solved. Furthermore, the web has complicated the problem because it allows anybody to steal your idea or artwork by simply right-click and save it.
Many artists limit their presence in the web because of this situation which prevents them from getting more exposure about their works or getting opportunities in a wide market that connect artists and customers from around the world. Actually, I doubt that any artist would like to share work in one of these creative social networks such as Deviant Art and Behance that allows you to upload your artwork and get feedback and criticism. These networks fuel the creative industry by sharing ideas and getting inspirations which are one of the most important resources for any artist to learn and improve his talent.

Image by shutterstock

New Methods to Protect Your Artwork

Totally taking your artwork away from this large market is not the best solution. There are some tips that artists should use and do to prevent artwork theft. Although, these tips are easy to hack, applying one or a number of it on your artwork may reduce the possibility of being stolen. These tips include:

• Adding a Watermark to Your Artwork. This is a useful way to prevent other from copying your artwork especially when they are not aware of the design tools.
• Not Permitting To Download the Image. This is another solution but many can get the image through the webpage source code or take a snapshot of the screen with the artwork.
• Adding a Copyright Message to the Image. This tells the people how to handle the artwork.
• Add The Artwork In Flash Slideshow. This may help but people can still decompile the artwork or capture it from screen.

While these tactics can help, the new cloud internet provides us with some other tips that can help your work, promote your skills and connect with other artists around the world to learn or get inspired.
The idea is building a strong presence in the web. It can help from preventing your work from being stolen because people will easily identify your work especially when you have a strong connection through different social networks sites such as Facebook, Twitter…etc.
Building a strong presence is actually a good start to extend your market and get better chances. However, this presence can be done through the following tips:

• Design A Creative Profile For Your Work. You can do this on different creative networks which can help your work in having more exposure.
• Connect With Different Artists. Give comments on their work and you will get a feedback on yours too. This is one of the useful learning methods because you can improve your work through these feedback points.
• Create More Artwork And Fuel Your Creativity With More Work. Try new ideas. This will help you improve and people will easily know about your artwork.

An active profile that is always fueled with new creative work and have many followers can be one of the good reasons to protect your work. By doing this, many people in the social site will know your artwork and identify any stolen pieces.