Do You Know Where Your Graphics Are?
Every artist and graphic site owner is concerned about protecting his or her works of art. This task of protecting and searching for those who may be illegally using your images is not an easy thing to do. In addition, once you believe that someone has stolen you work of art, the stressful task of approaching the person begins. Most of the time those that steal a graphics or those that unintentionally are using copyrighted images without permission, are willing to take the graphic off the site. But from time to time, and more often than some would like to admit, a copyright dispute will occur and make the lives of the parties in dispute a living nightmare. Part of the reason for this nightmare is that both parties believe that they have legitimate ownership of the graphics. This makes everything very nasty and could result in inappropriate behavior and reduced communication. The main reason for this is that neither party truly knows where their graphics are and who is using them.
One of the problems when searching for sites that may be using your graphics without permission is that depending on the graphics in question, it may not be very clear if the graphic is yours or if someone has drawn a similar graphic without any knowledge of the existence of your graphic. How can this be? Graphics such as flowers, balloons, dolls, fruits, and flags are all very similar. Just because a graphic looks similar to yours doesn't mean that someone has stolen the graphic from you. For example: If I asked 5 artists to draw a normal basic teddy bear, we would see that all 5 drawings would be similar in appearance (a fuzzy bear with, 2 eyes, a mouth, big head and 2 ears). We may also discover that each artist has colored the bears brown. Now the questions: Who copied who? The Answer: No one copied. In cases of such similarity the only way you can truly know if your graphic has been stolen, copied, or altered is to invest money in software that will digitally watermark your graphic and or trace it.
What exactly is a digital watermark? A digital watermark is an invisible marking inserted into the graphic image that provides copyright information about the graphic. The purpose of this marking it to protect the copyright information about the image. So no matter how many changes are made to the image the copyright information will still be maintained. The additional benefit of digital watermarks is that you can actually track them on the Internet. If someone is using your image illegally then this will allow you to find the site that is displaying your image. Out of the many ways to try to protect graphics, a digital watermark seems to be the best way of of going about it. But don't rush to the store right away to buy the software used to digitally mark and track your images, this software as well as those companies that provide the services are expensive. But GSG is on the job and have taken the steps to make your search for digital watermark software and services easier. Below are a few digital watermark services and products that GSG will be looking into as well as hopefully trying. GSG will update the reviews on these products periodically as well as list other products. Additional watermark software can be found here.
