I’m going to be very circumspect in what I say in this blog post, because I risk being de-ranked by various search engines and targeted by some legal eagles. But if you’re an artist of any kind and maintain a web presence, you need to be very careful. Everyone will suspect you of piracy—when you are the one who is likely to have your work pirated, not vice versa.

Certain entities in the U.S. are in their death throes because they don’t understand new media. They prowl the web in search of people to sue for the slightest apparent copyright infringement. Why? Because they aren’t selling enough movies, books, and music; their revenues are dwindling. They’ll soon be out of jobs if they don’t take draconian measures now.

They hate DRM-free art (Digital Rights Management), especially unprotected video, music, and books. These lawyers don’t work for artists—they work for producers and publishers, who are themselves dependent on artists to whom they pay puny royalties (on a $7.99 paperback, the author gets from $0.68 to $1.20—not exactly a living wage, is it, since it takes a least a year or two to write one? A bestseller sells as few as 5,000 copies.).

So, it appears that because I publish DRM-free ebooks, use iStockPhoto.com’s royalty-free images (after paying the fees to iStockPhoto.com), and occasionally link to YouTube or other online images, they are running this blog through their meat-grinder—even to the extent of scouring un-posted files that I might have stored online, files that are mine--my copyrighted material.

There are lawyers out there who will swamp your web pages with an intrusive spider that increases your band width charges and can cost you a ton of money. It can also cause your sites and blogs to be flagged improperly as a spam site by legitimate search-engine crawlers. In addition, this intrusive spider invades your privacy by searching through everything you have posted on your server, even confidential files that you have not posted publicly. (Think Picasa family albums that have password protection.)

Please read this article by North Yorkshire UK artist Ken Beyer: http://www.nyart.co.uk/index.php?subaction=showfull&id=1239732649&archive=&start_from=&ucat=1&

How Do You Know If You’re A Victim?

Check your site stats. If you don’t have a good site stat program installed, I recommend www.statcounter.com, because it’s free and detailed. Embed their code in every web page or in the blog template, as I have done. The stats reports will identify the IP addresses listed in Mr. Beyer’s article.

If you fear it’s too late—that you’ve already been de-ranked by a search engine because of unknown causes or have had to pay excess bandwidth charges recently—you still need to take action.

What Do You Do?

Ban the malicious IP addresses from visiting your site. To do this, you will need to use a program that permits you to list and block specific IP addresses. Check with your ISP for advice. You may be able to upload a file named htaccess to your hosted server, or you may be able to embed a Java script.

Copyrights

I am a staunch supporter of copyrights. I would never intentionally violate anyone’s copyrights or pirate any material. I don’t particularly want my material to be pirated either—but I give away much of my work for free, because I would rather have people read my stories than let a third-party publisher control readers’ access to it.