Art Theft

With the growth of social networks, artists have developed their own online communities where they can share their artwork or provide tutorials and critique for all forms of art. However, an unfortunate phenomenon has been increasing rapidly as art communities grow. The phenomenon is known as art theft, where individuals either plagiarize, trace, or copy another person’s artwork and claim it as their own creation. Luckily, services are provided within online art communities and certain techniques can be use to prevent, decrease, and remove art theft.
How do you detect art theft?
First, a person must learn how to recognize art theft before doing anything else. Obvious characteristics found in most art theft are:
1. Poor image quality: Poor image quality usually is caused by extremely inexperienced individuals who do not know how to save a high quality image. Also, because since most art thieves do not Photoshop, it seems many resort to Paint on the Windows OS. When saving a JPG file from Paint, the quality of the image becomes poor and pixalated. The original artist of an image should always have the best quality and highest resolution image available since they created it and paid close attention to the detail and quality of their artwork.
2. Difference in style or artistic ability: A very common theme in art thieves' galleries is a fluctuating quality in artistic ability and style. One image will be an obvious Paint drawing with little to no knowledge of anatomy, while another drawing will be a heavily detailed scanned image with correct anatomy. If the person claims to have done both pieces of art, they are most likely a thief. Every artist has a different style and, unless the artist is extremely skilled, will not be able to deviate from their personal style too much.
3. Signatures and dates: The saddest and most distinct clue is when website links, signatures, names or dates are clearly seen within the image. When these names differ from names on other