I was terribly saddened to hear that a friend was victimized by someone stealing her work and profiting from it as their own. You only think of big record labels and movie studios being taken advantage of like this in this digital age, but you can see how someone doing her own (wonderful) illustrations can have it happen as well.

As I posted on her Facebook page, there is no way to 100% safeguard yourself from digital copyright infringement, but there are at least ways to ward off the vast majority of the perpetrators.

First, there are general watermarks you can put on your photos, but they are usually ugly and can take away from your otherwise beautiful image. Second, if you are moderately good at Photoshop (even Elements) you can create a transparent layer that when highlighted reveals you name/watermark. There are tons of tutorials all over the web and on YouTube to show you how to make them. That is great if you know who has stolen it, but what if you have no idea that this is going on?

There is a new company called Digimarc (digimarc.com - I am in no way affiliated with them, but have tested the product and can verify that it works wonderfully and is quite easy to use) that embeds a unique invisible digital watermark in your images that you post online. They are invisible to the naked eye and even in Photoshop, but are tracking the downloads and postings of your photos. For a moderate price ($49 for basic, $99 for pro) you will have full access to track who downloads your image and where they go with it. If you notice that they are selling your image/work on their site, you have full legal reign to proceed with prosecution. +RC Concepcion an Adobe certified professional, has posted a tutorial on how to do it and track it. It is a very easy to follow tutorial that you can find here: Digimarc and Photoshop for Invisible Protection

Just wanted to let people know that there are easy and relatively inexpensive ways to protect yourself in this digital world. 

Good luck and stay safe!
Brian