I've decided to take my art down from some of my social networking sites, most notably Facebook and MySpace. The reason? I am losing control of how my art is being used. MySpace now gives the viewer an URL to the image so that it can be used by anybody, just like Photobucket! Every so often I do searches for my most popular images and I am now starting to see them pop up on Ebay and Zazzle stores on t-shirts and buttons. I am also seeing my images adorn websites and pages of people and organizations I really don't want to be associated with.
Another reason is that if someone were to complain about my images on a social networking site and said social networking site deemed my art inappropriate my account could be canceled. That would suck.
Another issue I will be addressing is hot-linking to my images, otherwise known as bandwidth theft. Hot-linking is to get the snippet of HTML code for one of images and stick it on your site which in effect makes your page look super cool at the expense of my bandwidth. This is bad for a couple reasons. 1) Again I have no control over how the image is used. 2) When I pay for my website hosting service I am allotted X amount of bandwidth. If I go over that amount I am charged or my site can be temporarily taken offline. When you hotlink to my images your visitors use my bandwidth. All it would take is some heavily trafficked website to hotlink to me and it could cost me a ton of money in bandwidth charges and missed income because my site is down.
Now, let's see if the guilty parties are paying attention. Over the next few weeks I will be systematically replacing my images with others. These other images may or may not be appropriate. Which means instead if the awesome Fannie the Flesheater image on your MySpace page you could wake up one morning to find some really disturbing pornographic image...and I mean some baaad stuff. Embarrassingly bad. Bad enough that it could get your account suspended. Or it could just be an image with a warning about hotlinking with my web address plastered on it. I haven't decided yet.
I know this sucks. But what I plan on doing is as I upload new art to my site I will post links on my Facebook and MySpace accounts. Maybe a blog post. Another idea I've been toying around with is starting an email list for updates on new art. We'll see.
Thanks .
Billy
Friday, February 12, 2010
Taking my own advice
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5 comments:
What a pain. In some regards, it's flattering. But I would definitely be more annoyed than anything. Especially if people are putting the images on products and making a profit from it.
"you could wake up one morning to find some really disturbing pornographic image...and I mean some baaad stuff. Embarrassingly bad."
Har, that is pretty funny. I can only imagine what the images are gonna be...wait, maybe I don't want to imagine what they are gonna be!
It sucks you have to do this, but you gots to look out for numero uno.
TR
Recently I've been working on creating my own portfolio website, and I've been looking into using a java scripted image gallery that doesn't allow images to be easily copied or linked to. I know that there's always a way around the code, but it'll keep out the majority of troublesome linkers, while still being able to advertise what I can do.
BTW, on a totally different note, my mother is very obsessive about decorating her xmas tree in a certain manner. This year she went all out with silver ribbons and other victorian-xmas accents that made it rival some trees you see on display at museums. She has never allowed anyone else in the family to decorate the tree, and it's been like that ever since I was little, to the point that I had my own smaller tree in my room just so I could decorate something myself.
So this year, as my revenge, I secretly hung the zombie santa ornament I purchased from you at Charcon on the tree to see if anyone would notice. No one did! It was my secret little prank that made me smile every time I looked at the tree, knowing my mother had no idea that her prized tree was 'tainted' by a twisted undead horror that brings brains to all the good boys and girls of the world whilst drinking CokeCola Classic.
Totally random story, I know, but I wanted to let you know just how much I enjoyed the ornament!
It's impossible to stop it entirely. I mean this is just web graphics. What about all the nice prints I sell? What's keeping someone from scanning one of those? Nothing. Just gotta keep vigilant and make it as difficult as possible I guess.
Emily, people said they were going to slip Cannibal Claus on their trees but yours is the first story about it actually happening. You should have snapped a photo!
I totally should have done that! I hadn't located my digital camera at that point, however I did have a phone that I could have used to take a few shots. Don't worry, next year I'm going to do the same thing, and I will definitely not forget to take pictures this time.
What's funny is that while she put up the decorations, she's still got the tree standing in the corner of the living room. I might go ahead and stick Cannibal Clause back on there and see how long it is before she spots it now that there's no other ornaments for it to hide amongst. AND I'll snap a picture this time.
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