Takedown

Redbubble Takedown

Some years ago I sent a polite but detailed request to an artist asking him to kindly give credit for the use of content from my web site in an art piece of his. He had copied and pasted content directly from the web site, and titled the piece with the exact same name as my web site. I intended not to get conspicuously indignant about it. I just did not want anyone thinking I had anything to do with this piece which was, frankly, pretty lame.

To confirm to myself that this was brazen theft I showed the piece to several friends and colleagues. The reaction was uniform: Wow. That really sucks. They could have been talking about the quality of the work of art itself, but either way I did not get a whiff of disagreement that this was outright theft.

The artist’s response came fast and furious: “If you don’t want people to use your stuff then don’t put it on the Internet.” This honestly made me think the artist was 13 years old (in which case I might have given him a pass) but I looked him up and discovered he was actually a pretty experienced professor at a small Midwest college.

He quickly changed tack, and within days my name appeared on the placard that accompanied his piece — not exactly a triumph but I was glad to know that interested parties would recognize that I had nothing to do with this lifeless obscurity.

That incident of unauthorized use crossed my radar in a most unlikely way. An artist from 1,000 miles away got a small grant to create a piece for a New York City sculpture park that happens to be right in my back yard, so to speak. He never even came to New York to see it. Had he received the grant from an art space in San Francisco or Chicago or any number of other locations I would probably have never known about it.

I remembered that incident last week when, inspired by Sarah Ann Loreth’s story at PetaPixel.com, I made the rounds of image search engines, mining the Etsys and eBays of the interwebs to see what individuals and entities out there are still stealing one particular image of mine. Many images of mine have been stolen but for some reason one in particular is used by dozens of online retailers and auctioneers selling protective cases for iPhones and Samsung Galaxy devices.

The process of finding these instances is tedious, and frequently futile, but this time around I was somewhat heartened by the quick results. Zazzle.com removed offending items within 24 hours, and even delivered a human e-mail response. Artfire.com was the same, removing a couple of iPhone cases adorned with the stolen image, and also delivering a human e-mail response.

Human beings at Zazzle and Artfire, as I imagined they would, actually viewed the image in question on my web site and compared it to the images used on the products sold through their shops. I could prove this because access_logs record either IP addresses or fully qualified domain names from which page views originate. As the image in question gets very little traffic any more it was simply a matter of tailing the log file followed by a grep of the file name to confirm that pageviews were connected to addresses at Zazzle and Artfire.

Redbubble.com also acted very quickly, responding so quickly in fact that I wonder if it was not somehow automated. Their response conformed fully to the takedown procedures of the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act), which requires that the rights holder making the request (me) make legally binding statements that their claim of ownership is legitimate. With that kind of legalese backing them up I guess Redbubble had no need for human verification.

That’s the only thing about Redbubble’s response that somewhat troubled me: No human actually looked at the image to see if I was telling the truth. I was telling the truth but how easy would it be for someone to shut down a legitimate Redbubble seller by fictitiously claiming they own rights to an image?

Another twitch about Redbubble’s response was that they shut down the seller’s entire store. Zazzle and Artfire simply deleted the items in question. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but Redbubble’s more draconian response strikes me as more efficient for them. Simply deleting the offending items requires human intervention and, presumably, verification of the claim. At first it seemed reasonable to me that these sites would delete individual items, but then I realized that these sellers in question are allowed to continue peddling hundreds of other items bearing copyrighted images for which they almost certainly do not have rights.

I don’t know how many of my images have been used for commercial gain without my authorization, but it is puzzling to me why this one particular image gets hijacked so often, and for the same type of product. Is there some rogue stock photo agency out there from which vendors buy rights to this photo, thinking their purchase is legitimate? That being a possibility I am not going to link to it, as I don’t want to bring any undue attention to it or to sellers who may honestly think they have legal rights to use it. We can settle that between ourselves.

I take the same approach as Sarah Loreth, whose work has been stolen exponentially more than mine: Know when to pick your battles. The Whac-A-Mole-esque futility of tracking instances of unauthorized use is a pursuit that does not come without risk.