Watermarking your cards - do you?

Hiya everyone, 

As you may or may not know there are a lot of unscrupulous crafters that are not only posting and sharing unwatermarked black and white uncoloured images on pinterest/facebook etc but they are also stealing other crafters coloured in images and elements off their cards to digitally reproduce themselves.  Or they steal the piccie of your card and pass it off as their own.

 

Theft on various levels is becoming a massive problem within the crafting industry which is why it is important to watermark your creations to try and prevent your work from being stolen. 

Claire Keay from Jelly Park stamps has an offer on throughout October that for £2 she will produce a made to order watermark with all proceeds going to Breast Cancer Awareness.  It also includes instructions on how to add it to your creations.  For full details of this please see here.

 

To make it crystal clear, if you buy an image then it is for your own personal use only in accordance with that particular companies terms of use which vary from company to company.  Anybody who uploads these unwatermarked images to various sites such as pinterest etc is effectively stealing.  Any of these images that are pinned are then shared and distributed even more which makes this problem worse.  

 

Some pinterest users have 1000's of images from digi companies to stamped images such a LOTV, Tilda and Hanglar that have been stamped and scanned on.  A lot of people who are pinning these images do not realise it is a problem as they do not realise that they are sharing illegal images even further.  Images with watermarks are fine - it's the ones that can be saved and printed off that's the problem.  Stamped images that have been scanned on are not supposed to be reproduced mechanically.   

 

Just because these images are there does not make them free or fair game as it is completely against copyright to share them in this way.  A lot of people wrongly think that they are in the public domain but this is not the case.

 

I really feel for the artists involved as this is how they make their living so if people are using their images that haven't been paid for it is not fair on the honest crafters who do pay for the images.  If their income falls they may no longer be able to produce the fantastic images that we all love working with.

 

Thanks for listening - I know it's not nice but people need to be aware of what's happening!