Ok, so I just went on their website and, surprise surprise, some of my stuff’s on there to.
So, in the spirit of being fair and open, I went to the ‘contact us’ section of their web page and wrote them a little letter. This is what I had to say…
“I have recently been made aware that many artists (including myself) are having their artwork held for sale on this website without their prior knowledge or consent. I’m fully aware that many websites like this tend to use the defense of ‘user submitted content’ to try to mitigate the blatant violations of intellectual property rights, but the quantity of images that I recognize of belonging to people that I know combined with the questionably robotic nature of the names that the ‘products’ have been given strongly suggests that these images were re-hosted by yourselves automatically and en masse.
Before I consider taking any formal action to have my work removed from your website, I would be interested to know if you ever plan on reimbursing the artists who’s work you profit off of. I’m afraid that you’ll have to excuse my skepticism, but I’m fairly certain that had I not heard of this IP rights violation from other artists, I would have never discovered you. I’m even more certain that you would not have actively contacted me regarding my work being sold by yourselves.
I would like to take this time to offer you the opportunity to share your sales data with me for any item that you have for sale that contains “amkitsune” (and any other upper/lower case variation of) in the title and for you to reimburse me for a percentage gained from the sales of the aforementioned products. Given the circumstances of the sales, I’m willing to accept a payment to the value of anywhere above 80% of the cumulative sales value of said products.
I hope you can forgive me for referring to myself by my on-line alias as I’m reluctant to give my personal details to a website that freely deals in reselling artwork without the original artists permission.
If I fail to receive any kind of satisfactory reply from yourselves within the next 14 working days, I will seek legal advice and escalate the matter further.
I have also taken the initiative to save copies of a number of the product pages from which you are currently selling my content.
I look forward to hearing back from you so that we may discuss this matter further and hopefully reach an agreement.
Yours sincerely,
A.M.Kitsune”
Guess what? After clicking send, I was greeted by a blank page. So I tried again on a different browser (as my firefox has all sorts of addons that could potentially interfere with these sorts of things). Tried it in Chrome and, would you have guessed it? Same thing.
I think it’s a pretty safe assumption to make that they don’t want people contacting them for reasons other than giving them money.
So I looked for the DMCA claim section of their site. After a quick skim through the ‘legal jargonese’, I couldn’t actually find any contact details to send a takedown request to. I know. It’s pathetic.
So after that, I did a quick ‘whois’ lookup and found the website registra (I assume they’re the people who the site’s registered with?) and send them a message. That message whent a little something exactly like this…
“I have recently tried contacting a website by the name of “wallpart.com” which is currently dealing in reselling prints of artwork from artists without their prior consent or permission. Unfortunately, their website appears to be setup in such a way that users can not receive any confirmation as to whether any enquiries were successfully transmitted and their DMCA process does not appear complete/usable. After a quick 'Whois’ check, I have found TLD REGISTRAR SOLUTIONS LTD is the registrar for wallpart.com. This being the case, I would very much appreciate if you could provide me with a current email address for the owner of the site so that I may contact him/her directly to hopefully resolve this issue.
After that, I got a small message saying that they’d respond to the email address provided within 24 or so hours.
I have no idea if this is going to go anywhere, but let’s wait and see what happens.
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