You have just completed a series of digital art creations and you are ready to display them on your site. But before you decide to put your images online for the world to see, be sure that you protect your digital art. Below are a few solutions you can use to protect your digital art.
Get Your Art Copyrighted
This is probably the most important thing to do for protection but many still choose not to. This should always be your first step to protecting your images. There are various ways of copyrighting your images but only the government of your country can give an official copyright registration. The best method of copyrighting images is to create a batch of images and to copyright them all at once. Copyrighting images one at a time will be very expensive. Check our Dec.05 Article to find out more about Copyright.
This can be expensive depending on how many graphics you are planning to make and have copyrighted. Even though it comes with a considerable size fee, an official copyright registration with the government + a digital watermark is probably the BEST protection for your images. Digital watermarks will allow you to add copyright information into the graphic and it will allow you to track the image on the internet.
Watermark your images
If you cannot afford the digital watermark option, then this is your next best way to protect your image. The purpose of the watermark is to show ownership of the graphic which can be backed up by a copyright registration or a copyright certificate. The only downside to watermarked images is that if the visual watermark is put on an area of the photo that is useless then it can be removed, simply by cutting it out. If you are selling graphics, be sure to place the watermark directly on the important parts of your display graphics. This will deter people from taking your sample graphics and if they do take it, it will make it very difficult for them to get any quality use out of the graphic.
Script Protection / Html Protection Software
Script protection will allow you to make it difficult for people to obtain an image from your web site, but even with it, without a copyright registration or copyright certificate, this method would be useless. This is not a real protection just a way to make things difficult for people who want to take graphics off your site without permission. Script protection can disable functions like copy, print screen, and right click. It can also hide the raw html from the viewers. I personally do not like this option as it gives people a false sense of protection. There are many ways to get around the script. I have not experienced a protection script that was able to keep me from getting an image. The only reason it's on this page is because it makes it difficult for those with beginner Internet Skills to obtain the pictures. If this is your only form of protection then you are fooling yourself. In addition such scripts also interfere with search engines, flash image links, and other applications that may need to read the html. For the graphic artist out there that use this, have no fear. I will not give out ways to get around the Html and script protection software.
