DaniDraws.com

A really bad case of plagiarism and an awful copyright law has made me very uneasy over the past few weeks.

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Earlier this month, a site called Pixish popped up on the radar of illustrators everywhere and has ignited a lot of criticism and debate.

The problem? Spec work. When I first heard of this website, it was the first thing to come into my mind. But Pixish has denied the claims. I’ve waited to write anything about the subject so I could do the appropriate research and really gather my thoughts, but after all that, I’ve found that my original gut feeling was not too far off.

I know many of you readers are students and amateur illustrators. If you do not know about the issue of spec work, I would encourage you to take a moment and familiarize yourself. In this article, I’ll give you a little review, and also let you know why Pixish worries me so much.

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I just received an email from reader Melissa about a petition regarding the popular image-sharing site PhotoBucket.

This is what she said:

As you might know Photobucket.com is one of the biggest image hosting services online. What many Photobucket users are not aware of is that any image in a public Photobucket gallery is available as a print through Photobucket’s partner site Qoop. Unfortunately art theft is common, and many people find images they like online and then post them to their Photobucket accounts, after which those images are then available to be printed.

Jonathan Bailey of PlagiarismToday.com has joined forces with many internet artists to create a petition asking Photobucket’s owners and administrators to revise their policies to help protect artist’s rights. They are asking that the print service be changed so that only album owners can print their own images, and that they utilize an existing form of copyright protection that uses digital “fingerprints” of image files that have been reported to prevent repeat uploads of infringed artwork.

I have never used PhotoBucket before, so I did a little investigating of my own. I was surprised by what I saw.

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What do you do when you see your artwork being used without your consent?

I recently had the chance to find out.

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When you start out as a freelance illustrator, the first thing you have to do is get your name out and make sure your work is getting in front of the right art directors, editors, and designers out there. But how do you find them and which ones do you send your samples, postcards, and proposals to? Here are various ways that I’ve used to gather names for my own mailing list…

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Are you taking full advantage of the opportunities the internet offers you? The art and illustration industry is quickly becoming a part of the digital world. If you are starting out in this business, you simply have to know your way around the net. Here’s a list of five tasks you must keep in mind while you are surfing the web.

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