I wanna post my art for people to see but I’m afraid of it getting stolen or others reposting it without proper credit to me. Any of advice of what to do or how to feel about this?
Once you start uploading your art online, having it stolen, traced, or reposted without proper credit is just something that’s likely going to happen, to varying degrees depending on the appeal your art has and your luck. It’s not something you can avoid, and I’ve yet to see any site that has effective tools to keep people from doing this (they might be a bit invasive if they existed, or more harmful than good – keep you from saving pictures to your computer? Run an automated comparison to every picture in their database to make sure no one uploads it more than once?).
There’s no 100% surefire way to avoid it, so my advice would be not to stress out about it because it might be unavoidable, and you shouldn’t stress out over things you can’t stop.
But! Merrily there are ways for you to bring people back to your own content.
You can sign/watermark your work! Not a huge “DA” over it like deviantart, which obscures the art far too much, but putting your blog/domain/artist handle on a piece can help people interested in your art find you, even if someone’s uploaded it anywhere else without your permission.
You can politely ask people in your description uploads to avoid reuploading/reposting your stuff anywhere else. You might think it doesn’t do much, but it lets your viewers know you’re against your stuff being reposted elsewhere, and they might do some reaching out for you if they spot someone unknowingly sharing stuff around. Not that anyone’s audience is required to do this, but some people are just nice and mindful and they’ll do it out of the goodness of their hearts.
And for all the paranoia going around about “x site stole my design and they’re selling it on X merchandise!”, most of the time what you’re looking at are sites with user uploads where accounts aren’t verified and content isn’t checked before upload: most of these sites will have customer service you can reach out to in order to request your art being taken down, as the person who uploaded it is not the original artist, and you hold the intellectual property to anything you create.
I can’t tell you how you should feel about it: that’s personal and while I wish people won’t torture themselves over inevitable things, distress is as valid an emotional response as any. Sometimes it helps to ask yourself “even if the thing I fear happens, what’s the worst that can come out of it?” and work around that (e.g. “situation: my art gets used to sell shirts - solution: I reach out to the store that’s allowing it to raise a complaint.” / “situation: someone reposts my art on twitter - solution: I ask the user to take it down politely, and if they ignore me I report the account to twitter”).
Because my blogs are all fanart and because I don’t monetize it, I tend not to worry too much about the possibility of my content being reposted or used anywhere else, so long as it’s non-commercially. People linking back to me is nice, but not necessary for me, and if people really like your stuff the universe has a way of having them find you eventually!
Hope some of this is useful somehow!
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