In the past month or so we have been trying to track down the people responsible for stealing images of handmade beads from our website, marking them up with prices and sending them out in emails along with a number of other bead images, purporting to sell the beads for the prices on the images, sometimes for amounts around $25/kilo!
While trying to track down the people responsible we've found something that is not just sad but disgusting. No one in India seems to care. One person who had answered an email from us about the issue said essentially that it is 'normal practice' for the company in question to steal images. and that other companies routinely download other images and then pass them off as theirs for sale. The old chestnut of watermarking images was brought up, but why? Every image of a one-of-a-kind bead set would be slashed with messages, so the people who want to buy the sets from us would struggle to see the actual sets. Should we punish our customers because of thieves elsewhere?
We were told that there is nothing we can do. We can approach the British Embassy in India but we doubt that they're going to bother a large Indian company at the behest of an individual artist. A bit of the David and Goliath about it, yes? Imagine the Embassy giving a quick call to the company:
Embassy: Hello, yes, I'm contacting you about some images you stole from a website in the UK. Yes, we're not happy with it.
Them: Shove off. Tell them if they don't stop complaining we'll ruin them.
Succinct, and to the point. Bless them!
Watermarking. Why? Might as well take a photo, put a big blot on it and say 'Here you go, there are beads under there somewhere but we're afraid some thief in India or Russia or wherever is going to nick these images and pass my work off as their own so could you please base your purchases on the little edges of the beads you can see around the watermarks? Thanks ever so much.' Might as well start putting copyright notices across everything to stop the unethical. There goes the art world.....
No. Thieves are thieves. We're not going to blot our landscape for them. If they steal, it's their problem, if we find out about it we'll tell everyone but we refuse to ruin the work we present to the world because they can't be honourable, ethical or frankly just nice.
Oh, yes. Is it a culture clash? No. People are either honest or not. There's no license to steal in Russia or India, ethics don't change based on location. Thieves are thieves no matter where they stand. We refuse to believe that location creates OR excuses such actions. That would be an insult to the people who live honestly.
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