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Blogs by Laura Davis
When Your Work is Stolen 5/9/2008 12:53:39 PM
Have you ever had your stories stolen? My daughter has had her work stolen twice. Recently, my daughter Sarah, who is a freelance illustrator/graphic artist, had her work stolen from her website.
Last month she discovered that someone was selling her images on cigarette lighters. He copied the copywritten images and then proceeded to make big bucks on them (the images were of Johnny Depp). She contacted the owners of the site and they shut him down. Yesterday, she discovered that someone else had not only copied her work, they had copied her entire website and then claimed to be her! So now someone on the internet is impersonating her. Granted they are still using her name and any compliments received on the work are really directed at my daughter, however this person is taking away Sarah's source of income, because the only thing this person did not copy was her webstore, where she makes her money.
As a parent and a writer I find the whole thing very disconcerting. Does my daughter have a stalker? How safe is our work? What recourse do we have on the World Wide Web when anyone in the world could take your stuff and you wouldn't know about it until its out in print?
Sarah gets about 2,000 hits a day to her website and she has very loyal fans. In fact, the ones that are close to her, are the ones who found the other website. But what can she or we do as artists to protect ourselves from this type of thievery? It's a question I believe that needs to be addressed, especially in this age of identity theft.
