The Stolen Scream

This is a weird story that kinda confirms a lot of peoples fear of posting their images on the internet.

Theft.

It happens all the time. The first time this happened to me was when I was in middle school. I was in a silk screening class and we had an assignment to create a custom shirt design that we would print ourselves on the silk screen machine and receive a grade based on creativity, execution, and quality of the final piece. I drew a cartoon character and then did the transfer to the material that handles the color transfer. This has to be done by hand with an xacto knife, cutting only the top layer of a two layer piece of pliable plastic-like material.

*If anyone can explain this process better leave a comment, I’m thinking way back to middle school.

As a class we left all of our work in a filing cabinet kinda thing so we could come back to it the next day. I printed my shirt and got my grade with an entire grade point deducted for “using someone elses work”. Somebody took my hand cut cartoon shirt design, and used it for their project one of the silk screen classes later in the day. I felt used. It felt terrible.

The internet didn’t even exist at the time this story took place. At least not in the fashion we have now. What do you think of this story? Leave your thoughts below. Or, jump over to Chase Jarvis’s blog and read the comment sin his blog. After researching this story I found Chase’s blog discussing it as well. It’s amazing how fast news can travel over the internet. And it’s equally amazing how fast your work can be stolen off the internet.

Protect yourself. Register your work with the copyright offices. It’s what they are there for.

Here’s some link to Noam Galai’s story. and here’s one to his blog to see just how out of control it’s gotten.