Art Post 11 Starting to Scratch the Surface of Copyright Laws

Hello everyone! I am back on this topic after a week. Intellectual property laws can be very overwhelming. Hopefully soon I will comfortable posting art again. The idea of finding the answers to my questions is very daunting. Many of my questions are universal. Reasons like this --things that enmesh me with the outside world– are why I started posting on the internet no sooner than age thirty. I just wanted to share my stuff. But these problems are such a headache!

My feelings of dread are not baseless. A lot of human activity deals with different forms of intellectual property. There are different industries, in different countries, with different laws, that deal with different types of intellectual property. It kind of feels like me versus the world, which is a horrible feeling hahaha!

In my teens, at the advent of mainstream availability of USDA-certified organic food, I read about farmers who were sued by a corporation when they accidentally grew proprietary genetically modified seeds that had migrated to their fields. In my early twenties, I went to a talk where I learned about proprietary software and “copyleft” software and the repercussions of exclusively using proprietary software. I heard about small electronics stores being sued by a large corporation because they had a certain word in their name. These are just a handful of examples that floated from my memory over the past week.

Contrastingly, as the little person, it feels like there is very little you can do to protect your intellectual property. If someone steals your artwork online, it can be difficult if not impossible to assert your ownership, especially with uncooperative websites or different international laws.

You know what is interesting? I have heard the most impassioned remarks regarding artists’ rights and artists’ profits from people who are not artists. Maybe one of these days they can consult me and ask me how I feel.

A common suggestion is a watermark. Watermarks are not a serious line of defense! They can be removed easily through software or manually in an image-editing program. For example, a program like Photoshop! (Hahaha...) This is why I have never used watermarks. Why taint my art? Haha. Software that enables adding a watermark, like Clip Studio, says that a watermark “can” help protect your art, not that it necessarily will.

I think this is all my mind and soul and handle for now. Next week, I might tackle the information I have found from an official source, copyright.gov. It gave me a rough idea of what is legally considered acceptable.

Thank you so much for tackling this issue with me.

Asya