I moonlight as a digital artist, licensing my work to print-on-demand services. One of the dreams I share with many colleagues is to find that our products have been picked up for sale by a large-scale affiliate, like Amazon. Instead of the dream, we're now living in a nightmare. Since Amazon started allowing pretty much anyone and everyone to sell through their platform, intellectual property pirates are finding ways to steal our work and sell it as their own through the Amazon site. It's like playing whack-a-mole - as soon as we manage to get a seller taken down, they find a way to rejoin the site under a new name, selling the same stolen works. Unsurprisingly, many of the culprits are located in Asian countries that are notorious for not honoring intellectual property rights. Seriously, it's the equivalent of someone breaking into your brick & mortar store, stealing your inventory, and being allowed to resell the goods through a major online retailer who chooses to look the other way and pretend they don't know what's going on right under their nose. Print-on-demand artists have been having it rough as it is the last few years. Between ridiculously low royalty caps and the companies employing various strategies to basically steal referral income, people who were once able to quit their conventional jobs and support themselves by merchandising their artwork and running affiliate sites are finding their income stream disappearing almost literally overnight. Add to this the adoption of nexus tax laws by states trying to recoup lost sales taxes, and it's like a perfect storm, threatening to wipe us right off the map. Thanks to the nexus laws, we can no longer earn referral income on sales of goods shipped to our home states - because the services licensing our art don't want the burden of collecting the sales tax. So they're screwing us out of earnings on sales we helped them get. And it's not like one can just pull up stakes to partner with a different print-on-demand service, because they're all doing the same thing. The sale of stolen intellectual property on Amazon ought to be hurting print-on-demand services as well as the designers whose works they license. But so far, we haven't had any success at getting them to go to bat for us - probably because they're afraid of losing Amazon as an affiliate for legitimate sales. There's a change.org petition that has been started for the purpose of applying pressure to Amazon, to make them end their complicity in selling stolen intellectual property, but it's probably a lost cause. Still, if anyone is interested in participating, they can feel free to PM me for the link. Anyway, I'm wondering if we can have a broader discussion on intellectual property rights here, with the foregoing as the backdrop for that discussion. I'd like to know what, if anything, the current administration and that of a the next president will do to protect the intellectual property of Americans, especially in light of the looming trade deal that seeks to open up Asian markets. To me, all I can picture is more jobs going overseas, along with the utter destruction of intellectual property rights. Thoughts?
To be fair, I do not support much in the way of rent-seeking IP rights when it comes to artwork. Second, it can obtuse. My sister wanted to get a photo taken of a group of family members enlarged to make copies for the people in it. This photo was taken with a camera phone on a deck. Walgreens would not let her use them for the enlargement/duplicates because people's hands were showing. Apparently they have a policy that if you can see a group of people's hands, it is the IP of the photographer and they have to give written permission for someone to duplicate it, but not if you cannot see the hands. WTF?? If you put your artwork on the internet, then you are assuming the risk that it will likely be used without your permission. As far as I am concerned, you assumed a lot of risk and now are painting yourself as a hapless victim. Why does Amazon owe you some great duty when you yourself put your work out there to be lifted?
it's not the same as stealing inventory as it costs you nothing to reproduce another copy.... but it is theft in that they are stealing your sales seems Amazon could easily reverse the charges (maybe delay payment to sellers for 90 days), and move the payments to the correct seller for media when discovered, this way the end user doesn't lose their purchased media and the rightful seller gets the sale when it's reported course you would have to report it in the 90 days to get the transfer of their sales to your account.... if sellers wanted longer then 90 days, they could increase that time-frame I do think if I buy say a book in one format though, I should be able to read it on all readers, thus be able to download in any format I want, I do not think sellers should be able to resell content over and over to someone that has already bought it, this applies to music too ( to use an analogy, it would be like me having to re-buy my washing machine cause I moved to a new house ) if Amazon goes bk, the purchases are worthless if you can't use them on another reader, an amazon bk would be like having a fire and all your books going up in flames .
And it's exactly this attitude that sounds the death knell for intellectual property rights. Licensing my work to an online store is NOT putting my work out there to be lifted. Just because something can be view by the public, that is definitely not the same thing as being "in the public domain", which has a very specific legal meaning with regard to copyright law. Just because it's visible on the Internet, that does NOT mean it's free for anyone to take, use, and profit from. Doing so is outright theft.
Fine with ending intellectual property. If they are doing it from China and China does not recognize your IP rights then they are not committing a crime nor stealing from you and you have not lost a single dime because they would have never hired you anyway. Your rent-seeking entitlement mentality is precisely why IP laws should be gutted.
I don't even have to reproduce another copy as I still have the original. But it is a theft that can have the effect of reducing the value of that image to basically nothing. Once something like this is stolen, it largely becomes unmarketable. The thieves often don't even actually sell anything. They pocket the money from someone placing an order, and don't actually ship any goods. Customers complain, eventually the store gets shut down, and within hours it's right back up again under a different name. Then if someone recognizes my real design in my actual store after getting burned by the thief, they're likely to assume I'm the same entity, tell people not to buy from me, etc. It reaches further than the singular stolen design. Nope, it doesn't work that way. Remember, this is a work that has been licensed to a third party - the print-on-demand service, who actually process the transaction, gets the stuff made & shipped, and then pays me my percentage. Amazon doesn't allow a person to sign up as a seller who routes the transaction to a third party. I will never see a penny. The money would go back to the print-on-demand service in this scenario, and then presumably only if the POD service was offering that same work on Amazon. The thieves aren't getting the images from Amazon. They're stealing them from the POD service, then pretending to sell the products bearing that design on Amazon. Google has a role in this, too. They've made POD services get rid of watermarks on images and are demanding larger image sizes if the POD service wants to be found in search results. Why the hell Google gets to make those kinds of demands isn't exactly clear to me, but they are. Larger images = greater potential for theft. This I find agreeable.But merchandised artwork is in another category. If someone buys a pillow bearing my design, that doesn't mean they own the design and can put it on anything else their heart desires. If they want matching sheets with that design, they're still going to have to pay for them, and I'm still due my royalty. The difference as I see it is that with music, the music is the product, and the media on which it's played back is secondary. In the case of my design, the design itself isn't the product. It's the pillowcase, the matching sheets, matching curtains, etc. - - - Updated - - - So you think I should just give my work away for free? Sorry, not your slave.
If its not worth paying for, I doubt I would want it. You gave your work away the second you put it out there without being paid for it. Nobody is making you a slave. You just made a bad decision and expect someone else to fix it for you as best as I can tell. I know people who do digital design and make quite a nice living at it. They do not do it with bad business practices hoping that someone will pay them. If they are not being paid, they do not do it.
Additional thoughts: To FreshAir: At least when you buy music, you're not stealing. Art thieves aren't paying us anything. They're taking our work and profiting from it by using Amazon to perpetrate a fraud upon someone else. To Deckel: Without intellectual property rights, artists basically have no way to make a living from their art. Apparently you believe our labor and the other costs associated with producing a work of art are something that we should just gift to the entire world - for them to make a profit on it. I most certainly am entitled to the "rent" I'm owed for the use of my works, whether or not you respect my rights. Artists still have to eat, pay bills, etc. How are you expecting them to make a living? That you have zero respect for artists and their labor is duly noted.
If it wasn't worth anything, a thief wouldn't have stolen it to try to profit off from it. I did nothing of the sort. Your ignorance of the law and/or scoffing at it is no excuse here. You don't own the goods someone offers for sale by virtue of them being offered for sale. You still have to pay for them. If you don't pay, then you're a thief. Plain and simple. Seriously - do you think that if a grocer places a bag of cookies on the shelf, advertising them for sale, that you should be able to just waltz in, grab them, and walk out without paying? You're doing exactly that sort of thing when you steal the artwork someone created. They didn't offer it for sale as a gift to you. They didn't offer it for sale so that someone else could steal it and then profit from it. Intellectual property rights exist and are protected by law, whether or not you think they should be. Acting like you're my judge and jury here just reflects all the more badly on you. So you think artists should only be able to sell their works outright, not be able to license them for the purpose of collecting royalties? I find your opinion repugnant and despicable.
They paid what they thought it was worth. That is how capitalism works Not in Asia, which you have already admitted. Not even close to the same thing. Again, as you have already admitted, they do not exist in Asia and you have attributed this use to Asia. Unless you are Asian, you get no say in Asian law and if you are in Asia, you still get no say in Asian laws. I think an artist who gives their work away and then expects to be paid for it needs to take some business classes. I'll let you know when I care.
That makes no sense. If they thought it had no value, they wouldn't have stolen it in the first place, nor would they be offering something they regard as worthless for sale. You have a strange understanding of how capitalism works. If someone steals a box of cookies without paying the grocer, that would apparently be a case wherein they "paid what they thought it was worth" under your definition of how capitalism works. Under your definition of capitalism, workers would not be due any compensation for their labor. Come payday, the company could simply tell them that they're not getting anything this week, because the company has decided that their labor isn't worth anything. In other words, you apparently think that capitalism is a one-sided transaction, wherein people can just take whatever they want and declare it to have no value in order to avoid paying. That's not capitalism. Exactly the same thing. Your denial of the facts does not establish some new, contrary 'fact', merely because you declare it to be so. So you're basically admitting that you think Asians are just entitled to steal from Americans. Good to know. It wasn't given away. It was licensed to the print-on-demand service and added to a product, which was then offered for sale. Stealing the low-resolution version of the image off the product is still theft. I find it telling that you think people are entitled to just take whatever they want without paying (theft) and then use it to perpetrate a fraud against people who think they're placing an order for goods that the thief has no intention whatsoever of fulfilling. I surmise that you think people who buy stuff online are all fools and deserve to have their money stolen from them by thieves making false representations. Since I conclude that you have nothing of value to contribute to the thread, we're done.
the only way to ever stop this 100% is to stop Americans Corps from selling stuff made overseas and to stop Americans from by from overseas otherwise I see no way to address it, other then the seller to make sure others are not selling their works and complain when they do (that is now part of the sellers job) digital art made your lives easier in some ways and harder in others .
All true. We also think that Amazon could do a better job of vetting sellers before letting them sell through their platform. It's a question of whether or not Amazon cares that their platform is being exploited by intellectual property thieves. So far, it appears that they don't. The next question is how do we persuade them to care? That's presumably why someone else started a change.org petition - to try to get their attention, since conventional efforts to date have been like playing whack-a-mole with the thieves. The bottom line is that some commercial artists will simply get out of the business, since they simply aren't getting a sufficient return on their investment and have no desire to essentially become what amounts to an unpaid labor force for the benefit of art thieves.
they could put a foreign corp on ban status once they have received x number of complaints I suppose, course I imagine china can make up a new business name fast too
Help me out of my confusion. Intellectual Property, sometimes called "copyright" or "authorship right" is generated by the act of creation of an artwork. It neither has to be (but can be) registered, nor can be sold, refused or be rented. It stays with the author until 70 years after his death. The one and only condition is that some kind of "creative act" must have been taken place. What can be sold or rented is the "right of exploitation". That often is confused. For example, SONY does not own the copyright of any film. That always is owned by the director. SONY only has a contract with that director settling the rights of exploitation. You say having "created" anything and "licensed it to a print-on-demand service" but that artwork was exploited by Amazon. The first important point to check is, if your creation, whatever it is, fulfills the necessary conditions to create copyright (those are very low. A checkered tablecloth will not be copyright protected, checkered in orange and green it could be). If that is the case, you are and always will be the copyright owner. The second point is, what "licensed to a print-on-demand-service" means. If something was sent there for printing, the service has no right to exploit it in any way. Otherwise it would the intellectual property theft. If "licensed" means: the service has the right of exploitation and "re selling" was not excluded in your contract, then the owner of those rights can do whatever he wants with them, including reselling those rights or licensing them to another. Even sell it to Amazon or give it for free to the Chinese. Everything which is not excluded by contract between you and the marketer. If those points can be specified, it would be easier to see if there is an act of property theft or not. If I have misunderstood the complete story - sorry about it.
There are legal ways to address this issue. The problem is the sense of entitlement that other people should do copyright enforcement rather than the copyright holder. It isn't other people's duty or responsibility to act as an enforcement agency for copyright holders who are too cheap or too lazy to pursue their remedies on their own. The music industry has several organizations that will enforce your rights/collect your royalties for a cut of the pie. You just have to contract with them.
I guess even a broken clock is right twice a day. My point is that the problem has become so extreme, that it's beyond the capability of artists to effectively protect themselves and their works. We are finding ourselves in a situation where we have to spend all of our time tied up in red tape, trying to enforce our rights. Which means we're no longer being productive, and not able to do the things we need to do to make our living as artists. And when you have an entity like Amazon basically providing thieves with a platform to commit fraud, that's a real problem - whether it's artists being affected, or someone else. At no point have I said that artists shouldn't have to do anything - that Amazon should have to do it all for us. So your "entitlement" claim is absolutely false. My point is that they're providing a platform for known thieves to perpetrate fraud. They're also taking a process that is already an onerous one - and rightfully so - and making it impossible with delaying tactics, like repeatedly asking artists to complete forms that we've already completed and turned in. So you can drop this false claim that we're shirking our responsibilities. My point is that Amazon has responsibilities, too - and so far, they aren't acting in a way that is taking responsibility for what they're providing - and easy way for thieves to defraud the buying public.
1) You're not telling me anything that I don't already know and understand about how copyright and intellectual property rights work. 2) My works and those of my fellow artists are not of the "checkered tablecloth" variety. There is no question as to whether or not they would be protected by copyright. They most definitely qualify. 3) The license we grant to the print-on-demand service is for them to print the artwork on the products that we select and offer for sale to paying customers. They're allowed to display those products on their website, and in advertisements, sales banners on their web site, etc. They are also able to provide those images in some cases to third parties solely for the purpose of producing the goods. They have not been granted a right of resale of the works themselves - in fact the terms of the agreement spell out very clearly that we as artists retain our copyright and all rights endowed thereby. Their license isn't an exclusive one, either - we both can and do retain the right to license those works to competing print-on-demand services. With regard to Amazon, our license also allows the print-on-demand service to provide affiliates what they need to market products on the POD's and our behalves. In other words, our products can legitimately be sold on Amazon - but our print-on-demand service is the legitimate seller, like any other seller that uses the platform for its proper purpose of supplying goods that do not infringe on copyrights or trademarks to paying customers. The problem isn't that our works appear on Amazon for sale; the problem is that there are people selling them there who aren't licensed to and who don't have any rights to them - people who have stolen a version of those works from the print-on-demand service displaying products for sale that bear those copyright-protected images. By way of example, one of the things a print-on-demand service can do is to offer customers the ability to personalize works - if we, the artists, set up that product with templates for personalization, or otherwise allow its customization (such as letting the customer select a different style of T-Shirt). To be clear - we are the ones who determine that - not the POD. One of the things the thieves are doing on Amazon is using images that were obviously intended to be personalized (such with a text template that says "your name here".) Since the thieves only have the stolen image, and not the underlying template that allows its customization, they're merely pretending to offer a customizable product. Some of them are actually sophisticated enough that they can customize the product for the customer - we know of a case where someone was doing this on Etsy, and a fellow artist ultimately succeeded in getting the thief banned from the Etsy site for it. But many of these outfits are just taking orders and never even shipping any goods. I'm not some rube who didn't read what I was signing off on when I signed up with my print-on-demand service. I know my rights, and I know what the POD service can and can't do as a part of the license I grant them.
Thanks. i now agree that it is theft of intellectual property and copyright infringement. Why don't you submit a written complaint to the law enforcement services of the country of the thief. In my country copyright infringement is an "official offense", meaning, it HAS to be investigated by police. However: they cannot know any copyright owner in person. If nobody complains, they don't move their as..es.. In the 2 countries I live (Germany and France) those offenses are punished very seriously. example: In Germany specialized law firms send "billable written warnings" to illegal video downloaders, fees being in the range of US $ 2500.- per video file. If you don't agree, you have to go to court. If you loose, it will cost you ten times that fee.That is for video files. I can imagine that those "fees" would be much higher concerning your work. It simply depends on the country the fraudster lives in. If that is China or Russia: good luck.
That people can obtain goods and services from businesses without paying for it and be shielded by bankruptcy and consumer laws, but if an "artist" is a victim, the person can go to prison and be forced to pay obscene fines is a testament to how screwed up rent-seeking has become in society.
I myself have 29 patents of which I am the author or Copyright owner and my Company has the right of exploitation, which to myself is paid by royalties. I rigorously respect intellectual property rights. I do not use non licensed Software copies and I pay for the mp3 files I download. What else should motivate artists, inventors or scientists to be creative. although those People have inherited "creative energy" the theft of their creations quickly brings that energy to Zero. the only exception to me are Teens downloading some illegal Music copies. That music industry which is the loudest to accuse others of theft is making billions with personal consumer data of their Clients. All those tracking and LSO Cookies we all have on our Computers "steal" Little peaces of Information we otherwise could sell and if only for one penny. At least the youngest and poorest copy right infringers could be left in peace by ourselves "donating" our Internet browsing data to the industry to prevent starvation at SONY.com.
