I’ve seen a lot of artist’s websites with fierce and furious demands not to “steal” their artwork (by which they mean the small digital reproductions of their artwork), insulting visitors before they’ve even begun to explore a website.

I’ve seen those annoying cut-and-paste JavaScripts to attempt to disable the right-click functionality (as well as a lot of other useful and legitimate functionality) to prevent visitors from saving the small digital reproductions of the artist’s work, in the process crippling visitors’ browsers and pissing them off.

I run things slightly differently - I agree with Tim O’Reilly’s seminal post “Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution” where he stated:

“Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy”

To me the small digital reproductions of my artwork that I display on my site are not my artwork - they’re my marketing.  And if they’re viral marketing (i.e. visitors want to download them and use them as their PC wallpaper or—even better—distribute them to other people on their MySpace pages) then I’ve been even more successful.

My artwork—as you’ll know if you’ve taken a look at my galleries—consists of collages, assemblages and drawings, with a few photographs.  It doesn’t consist of the small digital images of those pieces of artwork.  So when people take those images and use them for their own non-commercial purposes then it isn’t theft, it’s other people doing my marketing for me.

Now, you could say that because I don’t watermark my images then how can it be marketing - how can someone seeing one of my images on someone’s MySpace account possibly help me when the image can’t be attributed to me?

It’s simple - people like being Mavens. When asked “Wow, where did you get that image from” (OK, it’s probably more likely to be phrased as “OMFG!!111 - WHR DD U GT THT PIC FRM?!!”, but you get the idea) then the person can show off their knowledge by pointing the amazed newcomer in the direction of the originating website - my website!

Sure, in that situation some idiots may claim that they made it themselves, but that doesn’t cost me anything so I don’t care.

Sure, it costs me a tiny bit of bandwidth if people are too lazy to host it themselves, but if that’s the case then AWStats—my stat-tracking software—will tell me where it’s being used (because the referring page will be logged), which lets me see who likes the images of my artwork and how they’re being used - which is incredibly valuable information.  And the bandwidth cost is neglible - my £100-a-year web-hosting package gives me 150GB bandwidth transfer per month and I only use a fraction of that anyway.

There’s just one exclusion to the above.  I specified people using these images for non-commercial purposes.  Commercial usage is an entirely different matter, and for commercial usage money should change hands (from their hands into my hands!).