So much of my time as a photographer is finding people illegally taking and using my work, violating my copyright, and providing a lot of my existential dread of being a professional. From the day my work started becoming good enough for attention people wanting to exploit it and take it for free converged out of the woodwork. It has since been an eternal struggle to stop people be they strangers, event participants, or large corporations for taking my work without proper permissions and payments.

The latest case comes from Redbubble where I do as an artist upload graphics and such for a source of passive income. I have great sales months on there and other months nothing sells, and its all ok because I am doing it because it is fun. Yet what isn’t fun is seeing my exact design, cropped, and uploaded by another user.

My designs are partially created using photographs I take which means I know a lot about my work, I can tell you locations, people there, times, dates, you name it. A lot are designs created from my rodeo days because I have thousands of images and its fun to play with them.

Now there are ways to fight back. I have been doing it forever. You can post them, you can comment, you can bill them, and per this case you can issue a DMCA (Digital Milliennium Copyright Act— takedown notice).

In the case of redbubble you send the DMCA to their customer service and they follow through, it is a relatively easy process even though it is inconveniencing to keep getting your work stolen. The matter thus far for me has been resolved but the person who stole my work still has the opportunity to contest the takedown. While I do not expect them to contest the issue just wait a bit and repost my stolen image it is sadly a frustration of professionals that no matter what we do people continually take advantage.

I am told often that prices are high, that they think x photos are only worth x price and not the value I assign to things. And then will turn around and find my work being taken because of its quality, salability, and more. Creatives are constantly being told we do not have real jobs, charge too much, and then have everyone try to take advantage.

Creatives are essential to society, we provide entertainment, marketing, product creation and more. We design cars, houses, and everything else, we know how to make people stop and see things, want things, and spend their money. Yet we are constantly told our jobs aren’t valuable and are stolen from. We need to do better as a society, we need to stop taking advantage, stop stealing, and start actively supporting.