| Is your art is being copied from the internet and offered by a website from China, www.arch-world.cn ?? Updated Dec 20th: Many artists are being removed. For a rundown on activities going on please see Robert Genn’s site at
www.painterskeys.com/clickbacks/chinese-list.asp
MyArtClub.Com webmasters Peter Newell and Cam Anderson are very concerned for all artists and want you to be aware of this, and what can be done. We are disheartened to see this marvelous communication medium perfect for artists twisted into theft by the hands of opportunists.
We first heard about the site late November 2005, just over a week ago at time of writing, from artist Janet Esseiva . Marjorie Turnbull advised artist Robert Genn about this. Marjorie is President of the Federation of Canadian Artists and has a link to our artists of the Port Moody Art Association You may perhaps already know of Robert, and that he also runs a very large email letter. He has done some significant investigations as he has over 120 works himself on this unauthorized site. His Dec 2nd letter called “International Theft” reported on his findings and plans. His letter is here
Generally you can find your link to this site by looking up your name on Google (use quotes, like “Reet Herder” to narrow the responses down to exactly your name). Then look for either hollow squares or ???? in the listing. You will see the website partially in English if you request Google to translate
Like many of you who are already aware of this, we are not exactly sure what we can do about this particular site, www.arch-world.cn. MyArtClub.Com does have a large number of artists who are on this site, and we are quite positive most of them have been copied form our site.
What we are doing for MyArtClub.Com artists with respect to this site:
1) We are preparing a request to the site www.arch-world.cn to have all the art from all our artists removed from the online site. Emails are: Arch-world@longway.cn and a removal phone number is 0 871 808 1666
2) We will also make an email representation to the Chinese embassy www.chinaembassycanada.org/eng/ on your behalf in Canada, and
3) We will also make an email representation to Robin Mader, the Canadian Trade Commissioner of Visual Arts Robin.Mader@international.gc.ca
What you can do:
1) You are encouraged to write directly to the websites / email addresses above.
2) Focus on ways to advise your customers, whether on your site or in person just how they can be sure an original is from you. It could be through ways like signing the back, or perhaps adding a serial number so you can authenticate the image. (We’ll be investigating this aspect, and plan to advise what we learn.)
A trade off to all artists of being on the internet has been that images are available to view, and therefore copy. Some artists add a “watermark” like the word Copyright to their image file. This is some help, but its effectiveness is debatable. Like with other types of security measures, given enough effort, time and resources crooks will find a way. Disfiguring your image detracts from legitimate customers seeing your real artistic talent, ruining the purpose for being on the internet in the first place. So artists are truly in a dilemma!
Protection of art images on line has always seemed straightforward, and built in. The image files are kept small so that in printing them, they do not appear well at all. Instead they will look “pixely” or “jaggy”. They look nice on computer screens, as the screens are only 72 dots per inch, whereas print copies typically range form 300 to 1200 dots per inch.
Whether some new technology has surfaced to make better prints from these small files seems to be the question. Or possibly with wages so low in China are they simply painting from the computer screen?
In conclusion, while we all find it is disheartening, we believe from every adversity there can be found some good. I am holding on to that idea for the long term view, and trying to think positive. I hope you will too, Cam Anderson
 | 
Strong Man