Art Print Issues by Barney Davey

How to Protect Your Rights and Know Your Responsibilites on the Internet

Long before the advent of social media, and the 800-pound gorilla that Facebook has become in that patch, artists, art publishers and art marketers already had moved towards establishing some sort of dominion on the World Wide Web. Since you are reading this blog post, the probability is you have grabbed some digital online real estate yourself, or you are on the verge of doing so.

Statistics show roughly 45% of Americans generate their own online content including videos, podcasts, blogs, Facebook and MySpace pages and online profiles. If you are operating a website, publishing a blog or email newsletter, or offering original content online you need to be aware of how Internet laws apply to you.

You need to know your rights and responsibilities on the Internet

Joy Butler is a Washington, D.C. based Harvard-educated attorney and author. She has written what perhaps is the best legal primer you will ever need to help you fully understand your rights and responsibilities when staking your claim on the Internet. Her new book is  The Cyber Citizen's Guide Through the Legal Jungle: Internet Law for Your Professional Online Presence .

The books covers, in easy-to-understand language, how you can protect your online content, select protectable domain names, and comply with privacy obligations to online visitors. You will find copyright, trademark, defamation, patent and privacy are among the laws discussed.

There are certain resources that should be indispensable, this book is one of them. It should be "must" reading for anyone who wants to know to protect their interests and avoid potential problems and serious consequences due to operating in the dark. I read this book after receiving a complimentary review copy. I found it most useful and informative and gladly would pay to have this practical resource on my bookshelf.

Become informed, make better decisions and save money on legal fees

Lawyers will charge you large hourly fees to explain what you find here for a pittance by comparison. That's not to say it replaces genuine legal advice when needed, but if you don't have to pay to get the basic understanding of Internet laws, then you come in educated and saving yourself billable hours by learning beforehand what this comprehensive book offers.

Butler also is the author of a book previously recommended here. It is titled The Permission Seeker's Guide Through the Legal Jungle: Clearing Copyrights, Trademarks and Other Rights for Entertainment and Media Productions . It provides detailed guidance for obtaining permission to use quotes, music, artwork, names trademarks, film clips, and other protected materials. As with the book featured here, I read and reviewed this book after receiving a complimentary copy. And, likewise, I believe the invaluable information it provides makes it an easy decision to pay to add to any resource library.

Shifting with the Paradigm - Hazel Dooney on Using Creative Commons

If you pay attention to the contemporary art scene, you are aware of of Australian artist Hazel Dooney. Or, perhaps you read about her here on a post I published last year: Hazel Dooney: A Courageous Uncompromising and Successful Visual Artist. She works as hard at her creative life and shares her successes, trials and tribulations like no other artist I know.

As one of the most prolific visual artist bloggers you will find, she shares intimate details of hard fought battles with her serious bi-polar condition, head butting with gallerists and clueless would-be collectors, her father's terminal cancer, working the creative process and managing her career.

Hers is the most revealing behind and in front of the scene look you will ever get at the struggles of making it as an artist. This is not made for television, it is real. Unless you cannot resist the guilty pleasure, there is no need to tune into to the reality TV show, Work of Art, when you can access the real deal on Dooney's Self vs Self blog.

What you will find when you follow her is that Hazel Dooney is as articulate with her writing as she is creative with her art. In both, you will find she does not shy away from confrontation or making points that make other people uncomfortable.

A few weeks back, she wrote and suggested I republish her blog post on her views and use of Creative Commons (Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.) where she said, "I think this brief piece on how artists should view the rights in their works and how value is shifting is quite important. It might piss some people off but I think it deserves a wider airing and discussion." 

I believe what Dooney is stressing is important and that we cannot avoid assessing the reality of how digital media and our interconnectedness truly have changed everything. What was will never be again. Facing what is and making it work for you is the only reality and only way to make headway in the shifting paradigms we face. Sitting still is not the answer. The famous Will Rogers saying hold's up well here. "Even if you are on the right track, you will get run over if you just sit there." Let's hear from you with your opinions.

Shifting with the Paradigm - Hazel Dooney

A lot of artists and photographers warn against the unauthorised use of images from their web sites, even if such use is 'non-commercial'. I can't help feeling that they're shooting themselves in the foot.

Copyright is a contentious issue. Like many other visual artists, composers and writers, I've thought hard about the consequences of relinquishing control over my work. Not that I have much choice in the matter: every image I upload to the web is likely be downloaded by someone else and re-distributed without my permission. And now that we all have cell-phone cameras that can SMS, email and access the web, even works in the real world can be captured and shared with ease. Nevertheless, the disadvantages of restricting the distribution of my work far outweigh the advantages.

Unfettered sharing encourages a wider awareness of my work and me.

I have licensed my images (and my words) under the flexible and user-friendly terms of Creative Commons for the past four years, allowing non-commercial users "to copy, distribute and transmit the work" under the following conditions: the user "must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work)". They must neither use the work for commercial purposes nor "alter, transform, or build upon the work" without my explicit permission.

Operating under this license is a fair and effective way of allowing reasonable public engagement with my work and my ideas and effectively 'unleashes' it so it can be reproduced and shared freely without impinging on those rights from which I might derive the most financial benefit, now or in the future, or on other rights I might have, such as 'fair dealing' or fair use rights, so-called moral rights, or even the rights of others either in the work itself or in how the work is used, notably privacy rights.

Many artists think that Creative Commons undermines their rights. They clearly don't understand that while it allows others limited use of one's work, it doesn't support, in any way, the idea that someone can steal it and claim it as their own.The specific terms of the Creative Commons license I use precludes the 'mash-up' of my work without permission or, worse, attribution.

On a personal level, I like to think that others can draw whatever they think they need from what I do – quote it, adapt it, synthesize it, copy parts of it, whatever – to create something distinctively different, providing they acknowledge me as the source. There is a big difference between plagiarism and appropriation, just as there is between forgery and reproduction.

Using another's work as a starting point is not at all new. Artists have fed off each others' ideas, themes and subject matter for several hundred years. The 'modern' tendency towards appropriation took root with Andy Warhol, whose unabashedly literal reproduction of press images and package design in the 1960s ruptured once comfortable boundaries between inspired originality and 'copying'.

Warhol's soup cans, soap boxes and screen-printed multiples of Elvis were important and liberating in their day. They appear a bit mundane now, especially given how easy technology has made replication of any sort. But Warhol's real innovation was recognising long before any venture-funded dot.com entrepreneur that attention was a form of currency. He was unperturbed when his own works – even images of him personally – were copied, re-worked and widely distributed. For him, as for the web generation he has inspired, ubiquity had replaced rarity as the key element of defining value.

In the new economic reality of the art world, increased awareness promotes increased opportunities for artists to exploit not only their work but themselves. The locus of value is shifting – from the 'product' to the 'producer'. Unquestionably, the wider distribution of 'product' (even if it's free product, shared without restriction) enhances the audience's awareness and with it, the value, of the producer.

As artists, we need to be focussing less on preserving our rights in our product and more on enhancing the value of ourselves as producers and being imaginative about how we exploit and extract that value. Above: an iPhone self-portrait at The Cullen Hotel, in Melbourne

The Wit & Wisdom of Sonia Simone - Great Advice for All Creative Types

I became a fan of Sonia Simone's work the first time I read a blog post from her. To say she has a way with words would be an understatement. Lots of people have that talent. What she adds is a keen mind and a deep understanding of effective copywriting and Internet marketing. Two skills nearly all of us could be better at using.

I'm sure her talents are why she is the Senior Editor for Copyblogger, one of the most heavily trafficked and highly admired business blogs on the planet. When I read her post below, it resonated with me to such a degree I asked her for permission to reprint it here. If you have already read it, I would not be surprised. It was tweeted 523 times, more than any other recent post on Copyblogger. Regardless, its pithy advice remains worthy of re-reading

The Three Surprisingly Simple Keys to Success

Back when I was writing novels and working on getting them published, someone gave me a piece of advice.

“You need talent, luck, and persistence. Pick any two.”

It’s probably been twenty years since I heard those words, but I still think of them all the time. They don’t just apply to getting book deals, of course.

Whether you want to paint, write, play music, raise a happy kid, design beautiful houses, or run an online business that makes you happy and rich, you can reach your goals with just two of those three.

At first glance it might seem like two of them are out of your control. But let’s look at that more carefully.

Talent

What most people call talent is usually nothing more than passion.

If you love it, you’ll do it all the damned time. And the more you play, the more you write, the more houses you design or symphonies you compose, the better you get.

Yes, there are a few “effortless talents.” There are people to whom the words come so easily you just want to smack them in the head. There are people who play music as easily and naturally as I eat ice cream.

But more often, that sense of ease comes from passion and nonstop, almost obsessive practice.

If you have absolutely zero talent for your chosen field, you’re going to have a tricky time. But usually, it’s a matter of fanning a spark of innate talent until you start to become quite impressive.

The more you work, the more talented you get.

Luck

I’m quite a lucky person. I was born in an extraordinarily wealthy country, at a time when women could do pretty much what we like, and in an era of vaccination and modern medicine that kept me from being carried off by some infectious disease at the age of 3 or 4.

Those are all massive strokes of luck. They had nothing to do with anything I did — I just lucked into them.

But what most people call luck is very different. It’s “being in the right place at the right time.” Having things just fall into place. Coming up with opportunities just when you need them. Knowing the right people.

This kind of luck comes from a few different places.

You can improve your focus. Just like you suddenly see red convertibles everywhere once you buy a red convertible, once you start focusing on luck and opportunity, they pop up like dandelions after a spring rain.

Nothing magic makes that happen. Those opportunities were there all along – you were just looking at something else.

You can improve your frequency. If you want to roll a pair of sixes, you’ll have much more luck doing that with 10 dice than you will with 2.

Pitch a guest post to 10 A-list blogs and you’re a lot more likely to get a spot than if you pitch 2.

Talk to 1000 prospects, rather than 200.

Audition for 10 gigs, rather than 2.

You can improve your likeability. Who “wins” the customer, the juicy contract, the retweet, the great job?

Sometimes it’s the one who’s the most “talented” — the one who’s producing the best output.

More often, it’s the one who’s better liked.

Be nice to people. Make yourself helpful. Don’t throw tantrums (public ones, anyway). Don’t build yourself up at another person’s expense. Make generosity a habit.

That successful raging jackass we all know? He may build some temporary success for himself, but everyone’s rooting for him to lose. His karma is gaining on him, in the form of a whole lot of people who would rather distance themselves.

The more you work, the luckier you get.

Persistence

This is the simple one.

Just don’t give up.

Keep writing. Keep making music. Keep blogging.

When something works well, do more of that. Learning from failure can work, but learning from success is even better. Big successes come from nurturing your little successes.

If there’s someone in your life making you feel dumb for your “pipe dream,” stop talking to that person about your goals. Possibly stop talking to that person at all.

Watch out for what’s sometimes called “inventor’s syndrome.” That’s what happens when you’ve invented some product or system or service that you think ought to change the world, but which, sadly, nobody wants.

Stay light on your feet. Find the story that you want to tell and that your audience wants to read. Find the intersection between passion and service.

Be too damned stubborn to quit, but not so stubborn that you won’t try new approaches.

And will you succeed?
Yes you will indeed!
(98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.)
~Dr. Seuss

Make your own talent, make your own luck, and activate your stubborn streak, and there’s nothing that can stop you.

Know what goes great with talent, luck, and persistence? Some first-rate marketing information. You’ll find it in the Copyblogger newsletter, Internet Marketing for Smart People. Lots of practical advice you can put into place right away, to make yourself so talented and lucky that you can’t help but succeed.

About the Author: Sonia Simone is Senior Editor of Copyblogger and the founder of the Remarkable Marketing Blueprint.

Orphan Works Act of 2008 Update

My fellow guest blogger on the Absolute Arts Web site, Walter King, was one of the first to sound the clarion call against the Orphan Works Act of 2008. His most recent post on Absolute Arts provides an update and plea for action. The post,  "Google pays Library of Congress  $3 MILLION for Orphan Works Legislation" by Walter King, provides information on the status of the bill, insights from Walter, and some useful links. It also provides this information about joining his mailing list:

If you received our mail as a forwarded message, and wish to be added to our mailing list, email us at: illustratorspartnership@cnymail.com Place "Add Name" in the subject line, and provide your name and the email address you want used in the message area.  

While you there, you can read my latest post, "The Dichotomy of Rare and Plentiful" by Barney Davey

Understanding Creative Commons

Amidst the angst over the Orphan Works Act 2008, there is another movement among creatives meant to share their work under varying acceptable circumstances. It is known as Creative Commons. I've had a link to it on my blog nearly since its inception. You can see it on the left column. It looks like this:  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

I found the presentation below to give an excellent easy-to-comprehend understanding of how Creative Commons works. It uses free Slideshare software previously recommended here.

Creative Commons : Spectrum of Rights

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: cartoon rights)

Street Smart Stealth Marketing Pays Off

Recently, I received an email from Joy Butler. She is the author of a new book, The Permission Seeker's Guide Through the Legal Jungle: Clearing Copyrights, Trademarks and Other Rights for Entertainment and Media Productions (Guide Through the Legal Jungle) 

It covers much more than most visual artists need to know, but the parts that relate to the business of being a visual artist are invaluable. Butler provides easy-to-follow directions on how to go about getting proper permission to properly clear the rights to copyrights, trademarks and other rights for entertainment and media productions.

If you have need to know how to legally incorporate a quote, music, artwork, flim clips, people's names, faces, brand names, life stories or other sorts of protected materials into your work, you need this book. Conversely, if you want to know the best way to properly allow use for your own copyrighted images, it will help you there as well. It includes more than fifty pages of resources and forms for you to use. This could easily be well worth the $13.57 Amazon price many times over for visual artists.

I'm impressed enough by the book to recommend it to you. However, if Butler had not contacted me with an offer I couldn't refuse, I would not know about it. She found me because I have published an Amazon Listmania list, Business & Marketing Books for Visual Artists. Her simple offer was to send me a free autographed copy of her book with the condition I add it to my Listmania if I found it appropriate. No strings attached. Upon review, I was happy to oblige.

My brother is a leading legal authority on franchising which makes heavy use of trademarks and copyrights. I showed him the book and he was quite impressed. That's a high compliment because he is rarely easily impressed by such things. Joy Butler publishes a useful book and uses street smart savvy and a little elbow grease to ferret out prospects to help her market it. I'm sure she will be successful with her efforts.

If you are a reader of Clint Watson's Fine Art Views blog. You recently read a post of his about artist Hazel Dooney giving away copies of her latest print free. I commented on it because it fits with my views that there are new and unique ways artists like Dooney are using to gain publicity. She's getting another bump from me right here. Her free prints have multiplied and amplified her marketing in ways no other marketing can reach.

How many ways can you think of using unique marketing promotions to help you get notoriety otherwise unavailable? If you start thinking creatively about it, you will be surprised at what you can do to help yourself. Butler's book is a worthy addition to any serious artist's bookshelf. For the price of a few minutes of her time to write me and a few bucks to send me a copy, she's gained more exposure to a targeted audience than she could get anywhere using mainstream media. Learning how to use guerrilla tactics like this in your own business will take you a long way towards gaining the success you want.

Here is another great example of how stealth marketing can work for you. Because I am a marketing geek at heart, I subscribe to Michele Miller's superb Wonderbranding, Marketing to Women blog. In timely fashion, just a few weeks before my wife's birthday, she posted about jewelry designer, Nicole Kidd. Turns out Nicole has been sending Michele useful tidbits of information for a long time without ever asking for anything, not even a reply. Just a simple friendly gesture. Michele's blog is one of the most successful and highly read marketing blogs and as such she gets voluminous email. She also has a huge list of potential topics to write about, so for her to mention Nicole, it had to be something special.

Turns out Nicole is something special. When I saw the link and read the post, I knew I would find something on her Web site that would be a perfect gift for my wife. I emailed Nicole and we had some very nice communication, including a phone conversation. She is a dynamo with passion and energy and just plain fun to talk with.

I placed an order and it was filled and delivered on time as promised. My wife loves the unique necklace and earrings and I'm proud every time I see her wear them because she looks great and I know she is wearing something not store bought and because stealth marketing really really works. Some of her favorite stones are turquoise and peridot, her birthstone. Look what I found for her on Nicole's site.

These are but two examples of how using inexpensive creative marketing paid off for the marketer. Like Woody Allen says, "90% of success is showing up." How soon you get your marketing efforts to show up in the right places is up to you. Get started now.   

Banksy Gives Prints Away and Fakes Still Get Sold on Ebay

The anonymous (well almost) British graffiti artist, Banksy, who has made a career of setting the art market on its ear hit the news again with this article in The Art Newspaper: Revealed: the eBay Banksy print fraud. The paper claims to have been tipped off by insiders into a scheme to sell fraudulent limited edition copies of Banksy's work on eBay using shills to up the bidding in the process. Read the story, these fakes were selling for thousands of dollars.

Spray Can Rodeo Girl - Banksy

This guy is fascinating. Callen Bair, who blogs about art for the Conde Nast publication Portfolio has written about him. Here's a quote from her initial Banksy post:

It seems ludicrous, then, that collectors are shelling out tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars for Banksy's works at auction, even if they are painted versions of his designs as opposed to prints. (Pie face done in oil on canvas got $379,446 at Sotheby's London in June.) Of course, Banksy agrees: After Sotheby's made a (relative) killing off seven Banksys it put in a February auction of contemporary art, the artist made a new work that shows an auctioneer directing a lively salesroom accompanied by the caption "I can't believe you morons actually buy this shit."

The Secondary Art Market - Bev Doolittle's Beyond Negotiations Sold Out & The Lunacy of Limited Edition Giclees

Brad Greek, a longtime supporter of my book, consulting and blog recently notified me Bev Doolittle's latest limited edition piece, Beyond Negotiations, was sold out at Greenwich Workshop, her publisher of many years. No surprise in that news really. When I blogged about the work last month, the larger canvas giclee 350 piece edition was already taken. It was only a matter of time before the smaller canvas edition of 3,750 would also be no longer available at the publisher level. Together, the two editions represent $4 million in retail sales for unframed work. (Erratum, the edition of 3,750 was identified on my previous post as being on paper. That is incorrect, it is also a giclee on canvas.)

There may be other artists selling out large editions like Doolittle's, but I doubt any are doing it as quickly as we've seen with Beyond Negotiations, which is her first limited edition published in eight years. Obviously, her fans, collectors and speculators remain enthusiastic about her work. The new piece is already active on the secondary market. The secondary art market and unlimiting giclees are the subject of this post.

Chinese Oil Painting Knockoffs Go Unabated

I ran an article in the newsletter that preceded this blog. It was titled, The China Syndrome - Assembly Oil Line Paintings Come of Age. I also submitted a press release about the article via PRWEB. Both got a very strong response. Nearly two years since it was written, the latter continues to draw traffic to my Web site on a daily basis. The  point was the rather sleepy art industry (by comparison to software, films and music) was being aggressively attacked by Chinese companies that create oil paintings by the pound. Often blatantly knocking off artists from all genres and locations.

From the numbers provided by PRWEB, it's obvious it hit a nerve center. The statistics reported this usage: 26,862 times read/2,165 picked up by news media/8 times forwarded/27 times printed/427 times downloaded as a PDF. If you think the adverse publicity or government action has slowed down activity in this market, you'd be wrong. A syndicated article originated in the Toronto Globe and Mail recently caught my eye in Tucson's AZ Star. Here is the link: http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/relatedstories/184714.php. It's a sickening tale of yet another artist discovering his art being illegally copied and knocked off. 

Around the same time I published my information, Robert Genn of the Painters Keys Twice Weekly Newsletter was also taking up the charge to try and stop knockoffs of his work and other Canadian artists he knew. If you read my story, you'll see it has been the subject of articles in the New York Times and ABC World News. Despite the press, the situation is far from being corrected.

Charley Parker's Excellent Advice on How Not to Display Artwork on the Internet

Some of you may have heard about social networking and Web 2.0. While this blog is not about those things, they do come to mind because I happened to stumble upon Charley Parker's great blog today. It is titled Lines and Colors. He's an artist and Web designer, free thinker and definitely a Web 2.0 type of guy. There happens to be a site called Stumble Upon. It is a great way to find new blogs and all sorts of things on the Internet. I stumbled on Charley's blog in a different way, but it did cause me to think about Web 2.0 and social networking. I will post about those things sometime soon as they are relevant to art print marketing.

Back to the post at hand. Charley provides all the dumb things artists do to make their sites and images less compelling and harder to view for Web surfers. If you read over the list and recognize doing any of the things he talks about, I urge you to admit your guilt and take immediate measures to change your ways.

Think about it, How hard did you work to create the images? How hard did you work to get them properly digitized for the Web? How hard do you work to get traffic to your site? None of this comes easy, it requires your attention. What Charley is pointing out are the things you may inadvertently be doing that are keeping the traffic you have managed to get from having an easy enjoyable time reviewing your work.

There is a discussion in the comments following the post about piracy. The facts are it's here and not soon going away. All the arts are subject to being knocked off or pirated. The Internet just makes it easier for that to happen. It also makes it easier for you to keep ahead of the copycat crooks by continuing to innovate. I suggest doing what is prudent, fighting to stop piracy when possible, but don't let it get you down or eat you up. Instead, focus on being creative and growing your business, it's so much more productive. I have had contact from artists asking about Asian oil painting knockoffs before they have published their first piece.That is irrational fear. It is an admitted drag and time-consuming and spirit killing thing to suffer. But, there are worse things, like no one buying the real art. That's something to seriously worry about.

Keep in mind, that if you are being knocked off or pirated, it is a good indication your art is viable in the marketplace. It's a painful kind of compliment to have this happen, it's also a rite of passage. Go forth and heed Charley's advice and get yourself some sales in the process! It may not help to know this, but even Disneyland is being knocked off in China. Check out the vid here to see what I mean.