I’m going to expose the biggest cases of copyright infringement I find online on a more regular basis. Why? Because it angers me that some people think it’s OK to steal other members’ of their own community’s work, only to claim it as their own.

So today, let’s have a look at how MWEB (South-Africa) blatantly stole Numericable’s (France) ad.

First, take a look at MWEB’s latest ad:

Then close your eyes for second. Remember what you’ve just seen.

Now check out Numericable’s ad:

What do you think?

(thanks to @phr0ggi for the info. Follow him on Twitter, he’s a legend)

The Next Web published today 5 ways to Protect Your Work Online and says “Myows is by far one of the most elaborate services available to protect your copyright online for free.”

After Popular Science, to be recommended on such an authority site (with close to 600K twitter followers) really made our day!

Read the full article on The Next Web.

If there is one thing that I’ve learned over the past six years of running Plagiarism Today, it’s that deviantArt is one of the most dedicated and united communities when it comes to fighting plagiarism. Few communities have shown the heart and the unity on this issue and none that I’ve seen have been as quick to rally to stop art theft.

Whether it’s the formation of anti-plagiarism groups, of which there are now several, dealing with uncooperative hosts, or tackling commercial infringement of the community’s work, deviantArt has always been there.

However, of all the cases I’ve tracked and even worked with the dA community, the most recent scandal, the Art4Love case, is perhaps the best example of it. deviantArt is a site that does not tolerate artistic plagiarism and is at war with the site’s former owner and artist, Chad Love Lieberman

The story, however, is a bizarre one and a case of an investigation that is still struggling to discover how deep the rabbit hole goes.

About the Art4Love Scandal

A week ago, Art4Love was a thriving art site that sold paintings by a previously well-respected artist named Chad Love Lieberman. The site sold a variety of paintings supposedly from the artist in a price range mostly between $199 and $1,000.

However, that began to come crashing down when artists at deviantArt caught wind that much, if not all, of the paintings on the site were ripped off from their community. What started as a trickle of plagiarism reports quickly, through community digging, grew into a torrent, now at a reported 300+ alleged infringements.

The scandal quickly grew to also impact other sites Lieberman was also involved in. This included MarkYourSpot, allegedly a direct copy of Art4Love, OfficeBrokers and LifestYle Brokers, both sites where Lieberman is, or at least was, listed as an associate.

The scandal also began to impact other names associated with Lieberman, this included Craig Pravda, who some believe to be the same person as Lieberman, and was allegedly a business associate helping Lieberman with his sales.

As the scandal quickly grew, it began to draw more and more attention outside of the deviantArt community. At least one news site retracted a previous story about Lieberman, and anther printed a call to deviantArt artists who had been ripped off to have their works features after they published an article promoting Lieberman unaware that much of the work would turn out to be plagiarized.

But even as the art case was gaining publicity, others were looking into Lieberman’s text work and not only finding signs of plagiarism in his two books, but also discovering that many of his articles were also verbatim plagiarisms, mostly from the same source.

On Lieberman’s end, all the sites associated with him directly, as well as his various Facebook pages and other social networking accounts were shut. However, deviantArt members had been diligent in grabbing screenshots of the site and several had formed lengthy side-by-side comparisons of the works on Art4Love and deviantArt.

These images enabled the comparison work to continue despite the closure of the various domains.

One of the artists who had their work used, George Smith, sent an email to an address associated with Craig Pravda and received a response saying, in part:

Apologies for any issue that you may have with Art4Love from whom we licensed the images.

In no way were we aware that they misrepresented their rights to any of the artwork that was used on our site MARK YOUR SPOT.

….

They have stated that they sold their entire collection to a new company and that we will have to continue with our game MARK YOUR SPOT, which only sells BRUNCH CARDS, by acquiring new content or working with our own digital artists.

Finally, another of the artists involved, Alexiuss, claims to be working on and accepting donations for a class action lawsuit against Lieberman.

It seems likely that this case is far from over, though it remains unclear just how strong the prospects for a class action suit are in this case.

My Thoughts on the Matter

This is one of those plagiarism cases where you don’t need a plagiarism expert to tell you about the infringement. There’s no need for a complicated analysis nor is there need for any side-by-side comparisons. The images are the same and it’s as simple as that.

On that note, this is definitely one of the most egregious acts of plagiarism I’ve run across in a very long time. Not only due to the scope of the infringement, including hundreds of paintings, content from two books and several articles, but also the nature in how it was being used.

Given that Lieberman has posed for newspapers in front of “his” paintings and repeatedly said in the press that they were “his” creations, there’s no doubt in my mind he can be described as a professional plagiarist. While professional plagiarists are fairly common, to see one to this degree is a very rare thing.

The biggest problem with this kind of plagiarism and especially with one this large and dedicated is separating truth from fiction. Despite the diligent work for the deviantArt community, there’s a lot of uncertainty about this person, how he does business and with whom.

Plagiarists at this level rarely are who they claim to be. Though I’m not saying that any of the information that is available is inaccurate, I’m saying there’s no way to be certain it is or isn’t without an independent verification. (Note: This is why I’m not talking too much about reports he is Senator Joe Lieberman’s nephew.)

In my experience, operations like this one are typically not run like an amateur artist who got desperate and plagiarized a few pieces, but more like a criminal organization started from the ground up for the purpose of plagiarizing and profiting from others’ work. This, likely, plays a role in the quick disappearance of Lieberman and will likely frustrate any attempts to sue him.

Of course, any attempts to sue him will also likely be hindered by U.S. law. Any artists infringed, even if they are abroad, will only be eligible for actual damages (the greater of what he made or the artist lost) and won’t be able to claim the high statutory damages (up to $150,000 per work) or attorney’s fees. Even registering now, after the infringement, won’t help with damages though it will enable U.S-based artists to sue.

In short, as despicable as the plagiarism is, there may be very little that the courts can do in this case as any copyright lawyer is going to be reluctant to touch the case with a lot of up front legal costs.

In the end, the best that one can likely hope for is that the site stays shut down and Lieberman doesn’t make a return.

Bottom Line

What amazed about this case isn’t just that it happened, but that it took so long for it to be found out. It’s not as if Art4Love was a small site hiding in the corner. It was out in the open, seeking and getting media attention all the while selling duplicates of artwork from deviantArt.

Of course, it wasn’t just images. It was also text in books and articles involved. But with so much lifted, it’s amazing that it took as long as it did, at least a few years, for the infringements to be noticed.

But while justice may be slow, it does prove that it does come, especially when you do something so broad and so egregious. There was simply no way that Lieberman would not be caught and, right now, he should be amazed that he had as long of a ride as he did.

After all, each plagiarism is like playing a game of Russian Roulette. You know eventually the odds will turn against you, but you hope it isn’t this time.

Note: Infringement samples taken from this post.

This work by Jonathan Bailey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Source: http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2011/08/22/the-art4love-chad-love-lieberman-plagiarism-scandal/

With a readership of close to half a million, the Cape Argus is Cape Town’s leading late edition daily newspaper and we were overjoyed to discover that their “Matric Matters” supplement has its copyright protected with Myows!

Google Alerts and Analytics make it possible for us to see which online publications protect their copyright with us, but when it comes to print or television, we sometimes need to rely on your submissions to see just how far our reach extends.

That’s how we found out last year that Popular Science Magazine recommends Myows but I’m sure a lot of TV and print mentions of our Copyright Management App slip through the cracks.

So if you use or see our logo in offline action, please take a picture on your cellphone and send it through (or post it directly on the Myows Facebook Page)! That’ll make our day.

The Copyright Culture is growing

Copyright and how it applies to freelancers worldwide is a hot topic. Last week 2 in-depth and hugely informative posts hit the blogosphere and we wanted to share them with you.

Copyright and the art of Licensing

Copyright Myths and Original Design

A point of interest is that both writers warmly recommend you manage your copyright online with Myows.

Thank you Vail & Joel! Your support means the world to us.

Everyone involved with Myows received an early Christmas gift when our copyright management app was featured alongside DropBox, Basecamp or Google Docs as one of the most useful websites for Freelancers on the very respected creativeboom.co.uk.

Go see for yourself the article Top 43 useful websites and tools for Freelancers; you will find Myows under “Legal Resources”, and you will hopefully also discover some other useful websites you didn’t know about.

We’ve launched our first community open letter at dear-google.com and we’d really like YOU to sign it. When it comes to addressing the big guys, there’s a fine line between ranting and sucking up. We hope we’ve trodden that line well, but we’ll leave that up to you to judge. Basically, we’re looking for new ways to create an online culture that’s  little more mindful of copyrights WITHOUT making it tougher to browse or use content. We figured this kind of dialogue may be a good place to start… Here are some excerpts:

“We are creative people. We are developers, photographers, bloggers, designers. We are artists. We create for a living. We create for love. Piracy and intellectual property theft harms us daily…. We would like to work together to make it harder to steal using Google…. We’d like to do this without impeding the search experience or asking Google to relinquish its impartiality. We are looking for a win-win situation”

The foundations are then laid for a simple but effective three pronged approach:

1. “Penalize pirate sites that sell illegal copies of other people’s material (images, designs, templates, text, music etc.).”

2. “Discourage non-attributing content scrapers that profit from traffic generated through stolen content (images, text, artwork, video, data etc.).”

3. “Where available, we would really like to see copyright information displayed in search results for all web pages and sites (including owner, date and author details).”

Of course, these three points are elaborated in considerably more detail on the petition site, dear-google.com.

“We believe that these three simple suggestions will help foster greater respect for original work and the creators that create them. Please consider working with creatives to implement these or similar measures by 11 November 2011. Not because we’re asking but because it’s right, very not-evil and it’ll contribute greatly to an online environment that fosters respect for content creators and their work.”

In their April Issue, Popular Science published an article about “writing your masterpiece” and recommends you protect your copyright with Myows. I quote: “Once you write it, copyright it. Myows.com is a third party verifier that helps you defend against plagiarism. (…) if someone tries to rip it off (nb: your masterpiece), you’ve got airtight evidence that you’ve penned it first.”

The web is currently buzzing about Twitter’s acquisition of Tweetie and this move is having unexpected consequences for the Twitterverse: dozens of businesses who were built on top of the Twitter API will now have to live in Tweetie’s shadow (renamed Twitter for iPhone) and choose between closing down or finding new avenues to explore.

So what does this have to do with Myows?

By everybody’s opinion, there are too many Twitter apps. But we have a solution for the global programmers’ community: Follow Myows

I’m not talking about following us on Twitter ( @Myows ). No. I’m talking about following us in our fight to curb down copyright infringement and help creatives worldwide help themselves.

The revolution is in it’s infancy but gaining fast momentum; so now is a great time to jump on board and make a name for yourself by creating some new, awesome, gob-smacking ways to interact with our platform.

And how are we supposed to do that?

The answer holds in 3 letters: API. Our development team has spent a great deal of time getting the API ready for release and last week we published both an API challenge in which everybody is a winner, and also a neat video tutorial showcasing how to create an app by using the Myows API.

We’re here to help with any question you may have. We’re doing our best to grow Myows’ reach and community, and to get to where we want to be, let’s be honest, we need you.

So before you start mapping your next Twitter app, I’d like you to ask yourself: “Does Twitter need me, my skills and a new app? Will i make a difference in the Twitterverse?”

…

I didn’t think so.

Then go back to the above question and replace the word “Twitter” with “Myows”.

There we go!

Follow us now, our API is calling for you and together we can make a big difference.

We’re very happy about receiving this award. The competition was fierce; but in the end our copyright protection app won!

Thank you Top Site Tally for recognizing the value Myows brings to any creator’s work. We’re also very impressed with the review you wrote, as we never imagined Myows to be like a warm blanket, but we could get used to the idea!

This award is a very important milestone in Myows’s short history. It’s vital that creators take on the habit of registering their copyrights as soon as they create Original Work, and before showing their creations to peers or clients.

To promote this habit, we need influential websites to relay our message and help us grow the community of copyright-savvy creatives.

As we accept this award, we want to thank our families, our managers… and the Academy!