It’s the internet! Almost everything here is stolen and reused without credit. Get over it!

But more recently I can grab the url and search for images like that, which often allows me to see what the original thing was.

Hopefully continued development on things like that will also make it more embarrassing for those people who think it’s cool to stamp their names across other people’s work.

Maybe I’ll just share it with a few close friends.

But one guy did do that search and took an extra couple steps to figure out my real name. That dude is Scott Beale from Laughing Squid and he’s fucking gold in my book for doing that.

You really should have cropped the image to the bottom portion of the comic, Xeni, the one made of angry faces, prissiness, and (unattributed) 4chan memes.

I actually tried asking for permission for my Fark pieces awhile and all it caused was problems. People don’t answer, or want to negotiate, and by the time I actually would get permission I wouldn’t be interested in the piece anymore. Fark photoshop contests are time-sensitive, and 4chan constantly moves in real-time, so any delays are muse- and opportunity-killers. I also tried attributing for awhile by linking back to the source, but some people would take offense after the fact, and then poof, my work was gone.

Arguably Fark and 4chan are making money from my work via ad revenue, but I certainly am not, I pay for web hosting and software and spend thousands of hours making these things. I don’t watermark them or sign them, and I am absolutely delighted when I find people hot-linking to them or stealing them. It means they like them! There is amazing personal satisfaction when my mom forwards me one of those ‘funny pictures’ emails and there is one of my old pieces in there. It’s like a years-long conversation – the internet speaks to me in images, I speak back in images, and then enjoy the echoes that result from that.

Commercial and fine artists understand well the perils of not attributing or getting permission for their source images, but they are arguably in it for the money. I’m in it for the fun of it, I am compelled to make these things and release them into the cloud, my sole motivation being to entertain. I acknowledge that I build on a huge body of existing and constantly expanding visual work which has never been available until now, and it is a very exciting place to work. However, this blanket attribution will have to be enough: “It came from the internet.” Discovering the source in my work must be an exercise for the viewer.

don’t most photos at least have identifying info of: cameral model, date of photo and image number that would at least narrow a search if that info was indexed by engines?

Five years later I see the image being used by someone on an expat messageboard as their avatar. (In fact, a quick Google image search for “Ddong chim” has it come up on the first page. The drawing with the red background)

While it would have been nice to have been linked to the image, the fact was that I didn’t include a watermark or any other sort of identifying object… like a signature. And since the site was long gone by that point, I had no way of proving it was my drawing in the first place. Not being able to capitalize on the minor expat meme the image became was 100% my fault.

These days I try to stick my URL on whatever I put out there. I have no way to control how people use the image, so I don’t sweat it and hope someone who copied it liked it and wants to share with others. I treat it was free publicity. Then again, I’m not trying to make money or control a copyright…

That having been said: Anyone who puts their own site logo on someone else’s work needs their fingers smacked with a hammer.