Hi!
This post might be strange and long but I really don't know where else to discuss and I would appreciate if you could spend some minutes reading this post. It's about removing/replacing watermark and art theft. So I am making tons of wallpapers almost every day. I was happy to upload them here but then something happened. I realized my wallpapers are constantly being copied to other websites without my will (wallhere and others), almost after a minute I upload them here. Okay I can live with that. But there are websites that cut off the watermark from my works and even putting their own watermark on them. Not to mention that people are just using my work on their shitty youtube videos without the watermark of course and without giving me any credit, when I send them a message - no reply. I think my watermarks are already small as it is, if you have a solid colored taskbar and not a transparent one then most likely it won't be even visible when you use it as a desktop wallpaper. The fatal blow was when I seen my art being used on some russian apparel website. They are selling stuff with my own wallpaper on it. Meanwhile I struggled hard to make some revenue on redbubble and etsy but no luck with sales. Absolutely zero. It really bugs me how others are making money with my art, they treat my works like some sort of royalty-free stock material and I can't do anything about it. I am really just an ordinary human being with multiple health issues struggling to pay the rent and meds, so bringing these to court is out of question. I am really devastated to see how my art is being treated, how my name is being stripped away from my art pieces. I spent countless hours on my own artworks, I lost like 2000 abstracts and like 500 fractals last year due to a hdd failure. I now have like 1500 new abstracts sitting on my current hdd, they are much better than the ones I currently uploaded. I am eager to make them public, to upload them here, to show them to those very few people who are interested in these kind of works, but the thought of my art getting raped holds me back from doing so. I don't want to plaster my name all over them because that defeats the whole purpose of my art.
Any thoughts, advices, anything apart from "deal with it" is appreciated.