Art is one of few hobbies that offers an opportunity to make money in the process, and various online artists use that to their advantage by setting up web shops to sell their work. Easy-to-use online shops appear to allow artists the opportunity to use their existing work to make passive profit.
It’s seemingly a win-win situation—to enjoy drawing while making money from an appreciative audience—yet this clearly isn’t the case. As the internet has grown accustomed to never paying for anything digital, and piracy grows rampantly, artists have been hit the hardest as their works are stolen and resold at lower prices, robbing creators of their hard-earned income. In fact, the very same platforms that claim to enable creators to make a living off of their work are the ones enabling and propagating this widespread art thievery.
Redbubble, an online marketplace to sell designs, is the epitome of this issue, as the platform’s easy sign-up process and lack of any form of verification requirements allow thieves to steal from artists, free of any repercussions. One may think that only the most popular artists are affected, but small creators are often targeted as well.
Diamond Bar High School Sophomore Tiffany Liu (@greenionpan on Instagram) is a digital artist who has had art stolen on Redbubble. One of Liu’s more popular works, a poster featuring the popular Minecraft content creators behind the Dream SMP series, is the second image that pops up in a Google search of “Dream SMP.” With the traction it gained, some have taken to selling Liu’s art on the platform.
To test how easy it is to post stolen art on Redbubble, and see what restrictions it has in place to ensure vendors’ ownership of the art they post, I took an image of official character art from a well-known video game and turned it into a sticker. If Redbubble has any form of copyright verification system; something to scour the web for similar, copyrighted works, it should be impossible for me to put such a large company’s work up for sale. However, there was only one simple verification measure I had to deal with: Before confirming to list it for the entirety of the internet to see and buy, I was prompted to click a little checkbox that ensured that I had the rights to sell the product.
Despite not actually having permission, I was easily able to get a blatantly stolen image up for sale on Redbubble in mere minutes, hassle-free. If it was this easy for me to upload clearly stolen work, one could only imagine the level of ease with which prolific art thieves could scrape and upload hundreds, if not thousands of work by smaller content creators.
Redbubble needs a verification system that is more reliable than simply checking off a box to show proof of ownership–art thieves on the internet are, of course, prone to dishonesty–like requiring images of the layers in the piece, something that only the original artist would have access to, upfront.
It is already the standard proof that the company asks of artists to settle art theft disputes, and is undoubtedly a better verification method, albeit more labor-intensive on Redbubble’s part. However, thousands of freelance artists are losing money to thieves looking to make a quick buck; it’s the least Redbubble can do to put in more effort and help independent artists trying to make a living, especially since they are also making considerable profit off of these artists’ work in the process.