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Don't Buy My Art on Amazon

If you see my artwork on Amazon, I did not put it there.

No one on Amazon has permission to sell my art, ever.

In fact, if you see an artist's work that you like on Amazon, look them up on social media or for the website on Google. Ask them if they have given permission to sell their to Amazon. I saw pages and pages of artwork that I know I've seen from artist friends' pages on Twitter. I spent all evening trying to match the artwork with the artists and let them know. For many of them, this isn't the first time, or even 5th time. They have a monthly routine of using Google image search and store name tag search to find their artwork posted in places it should be. It's a job in itself. And now it's my job too.

The worst part of it was talking to Amazon's customer service rep on the phone who said, "Amazon has never had this kind of problem before." Oh really? A 2 second search on twitter yields pages of results. Then there's the BuzzFeed article.


So I sent a notice to the seller, and sent a Copyright Infringement form through Amazon. Now I'm just wondering how much of my workflow is now going to be hunting down my art work. The sad part is that my store name, Orionlodubyal, was in the damn title because they just ripped the tag list. My watermark was even perfectly legible on one of the images. I'm only slightly less angry about the sheer laziness of the theft, than I am that my art was stolen!




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