So when Artist Corrine first learned of  Google reverse image search and gave it a try searching some of her own art images she found her artwork used on several sites without crediting her. What did she do? Corrine submitted DMCA reports or Take Down letters to each site requesting that they remove her uncredited art images.

But then the artist also discovered her portrait painting of her daughter reproduced on the Zearle Youthful Folly music album cover without crediting her or compensating her. “The really sad part is that I don’t get a lot of traffic on my blog, and my art sales are almost zero, so I really didn’t think too many people were interested in my work.  I guess I got that all wrong, huh!” says Corrine. She has openly shared the details of the misuse of her art image on this album cover by writing about it on her blog, and you can read her post here.

Corrine sent us a photo of her original easel painting portrait of her daughter. She keeps the painting in her home. Corrine wrote: “For privacy/professional reasons I don’t want to use my daughter’s name or photograph” published online at this time. The photo above shows a larger version of Corrine’s portrait painting of her daughter displayed in a street art project. However, the artist is convinced that the Zearle Youthful Folly album cover art is not only her easel painting version of the portrait, but also her own photograph of her easel painting that she had once posted to her blog and not a photograph of the street art version of her art. “Nobody could have taken the image (used on the album cover), the photo is based on an interior shot, the lighting would be a very different and a crisper version (of the image) had it been taken outdoors. Plus the person responsible has admitted to using my photo in his email to me. When I posted the photo online it was blurred (just as on the album cover),” Corrine wrote to us.

The artist has now become proactive when sharing her art images.  Corrine wrote that when she started her blog 6 years ago, ” like any fairly new artist I wanted to promote my work. I made the mistake early on of putting out higher resolution pics.” Later, she posted only lower resolution photos of her work and eventually began using– ” a variety of means to try to protect my photographs and images of my paintings: using right-click features on my blog, reducing the size of the image, sometimes putting on a small watermark of my full name or an initial stamp with CB on the online version of the images.”  For the most part she was able to keep track of the use of her images. She sent out cease and desist notices when needed. “I kept regular track of my work, but regular searches didn’t expose the current crop of images.”  Only by using the reverse image search tool did Corrine make her discoveries. She has since deleted her Flickr account, removed many images from her Facebook page and her Picasa album, and put the bulk of her blog entries into draft mode.  “I have taken screenshots of infringing sites and made HUGE changes on my site. I’m vigilant about filing DMCA reports and have asked Google to remove some of my images, plus I’ve added a no pin (Pinterest) meta tag to my blog.”

When Corrine Bayrak contacted Artist Marketing Resources, we shared copyright resources with the artist. As we were discussing options, the artist  discovered another of her artwork reproduced on a second music album cover  produced by Prospect Records—

Read the artist’s blog post about the misuse of her art, here: http://jafabrit.blogspot.com/2013/05/how-did-my-spin-art-painting-end-up-on.html

Then Corrine found another of her Spin art paintings on yet another album cover! Read her latest blog post–http://jafabrit.blogspot.com/2013/05/another-one-of-my-spin-art-paintings-on.html

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UPDATE! Latest Update–this just in from artist Corrine Bayraktaroglu :

Marie,

My journey into copyright infringement is getting weirder– a wiki site mistakenly listed one of my spin paintings as being done by Damien Hirst and then I find a news article about a man arrested trying to sell fake Hirst paintings to Sotheby’s.

http://jafabrit.blogspot.com/2013/05/i-am-not-damien-hirst.html

ps. I think my daughter has the spin art painting depicted in the news article hanging in her garage LOL.