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protecting your artwork

In theory, there are ways of protecting your graphics from being copied and used without your permission - Digimarc is one such example of a digital watermark technology. It will cost you money, though - probably a lot more than it would ever cost to sue someone for using your images in the event that it did happen. If you're going to put high-quality print resolution images on the web to sell (eg, photographic works), then it's worth considering. But for web graphics, it's just not worthwhile.

Having your copyright infringed was a risk that existed long before the web, although the web certainly makes it a lot easier (just right-click and save to your hard-drive...). There are ways you can make that a little more difficult, but the fact is that anything that appears on a screen can be "grabbed" as it appears, so any actual protection or programming you might try to prevent it being saved is really quite futile. If it can be seen, it can be stolen.

So what to do? Accept it, and make the best of it. I usually put the name of my site on all my graphics so that if they get "borrowed", I'll at least get a chance at it being acknowledged - or the thief will have to make a deliberate effort to remove my site's name, and most of the time they won't bother. Branding your graphics such as I've done here gets your site's name out there, which is vital if you want to build up long-term sustained traffic.

I've had my work pirated, seriously pirated in a commercial way. You can read about the whole ordeal at www.goldentarot.com/copybreach.htm. But there was a happy ending to that tale, as I ended up getting a publishing deal, and perhaps the piracy played a part in convincing the publisher that my deck was sufficiently in demand to be viable? Not that I'm encouraging piracy (I'd still like to flay the thieving buggers who stole my work).

There are a couple of good copyright advice links back in the introduction, when I was lecturing you about respecting other peoples' rights.