Please stop this thief!

You may have noticed that recently I began putting my copyright and name right on many of my images - not all, as it is time consuming and even without the watermark they are still protected by copyright, but certainly my favourites. I learned how to do this because increasingly my images are turning up on other people's websites, facebook pages, and even in books for sale without my permission.

However, today I discovered that hundreds - literally hundreds - of my images (including those taken in the past couple of weeks and clearly signed with (c) 2015 Jean Ballard) are being sold as posters by an online vender - along with the art of many others including my wonderfully talented artist friend Deb (Riley's and Lily's mom, for those of you who recall my friends' dogs better than my friends!).

While I am no fan of online petitions, as they are mostly ineffective, I have gone to Change.org and signed a petition to shut the poster website down.  I have also posted the link on facebook to encourage others to sign and to share.

Taking people's creative work without their permission is theft.  Selling it for profit, with no compensation to the creator of the work, is the same as selling stolen goods.  It IS a criminal offence. Unfortunately international law is complicated and lawyers are very expensive.  The company, it its small print on its Privacy Page, tries to pass along the responsibility for the theft to its buyers:

[We] respect the copyright of others. This means we don't steal photos or images that other people have shared and pass them off as your own. We have no base of images, and doesn't host and store the image on servers. Wallpart.com only helps the user to find the images interesting him, the site uses data of the most known third-party search engines.Process of search happens at user's browser.The user himself makes search queries, all content displayed in a window of the browser is received from third-party search engines. The displayed images are loaded from third-party servers, and aren't host on the site hosting.When the user make the order, we get the image from the user, he is responsibility for use.Wallpart.com doesn't bear responsibility for the images received from users.

In other words they have found a loophole - but that doesn't negate the fact that they are knowingly printing the posters from images they encourage others to use, fail to check that copyright permission has been received, and get a profit from the sale of these posters they've made from stolen images.

Please help stop this thief.  Sign the petition, don't buy from this site, and share this information and my request with your friends.

Here is the link to the petition, which also tells you the name of the offending company:  Click here for petition. 

Thank you.