Defending Authorship on Instagram

 Happy Sunday, everyone!

Below is an excerpt from my Knowledge sharing assignment, where I discuss two popular illustrators who defended their art on Instagram:

It appears that neither platform has been without its share of issues when it comes to authorship, though it has come with varying degrees of support to the creators. Two examples that come to mind were personally witnessed on Instagram from followed accounts, include the illustrators Yuko Shimizu (@Yukoart) and Adam Ellis (@Adamtots). On May 12, 2021, Shimizu posted an image of a man wearing a shirt with one of her designs. The picture had come from a fan who purchased the shirt in Vietnam. The artist made it very clear that the merchandise was counterfeit, and she continued on to discuss how incidents such as this occurred frequently over her 15 years as an artist. However, she utilized the shirt company's handle and alerted them that she would be willing to partner with them should they wish to pursue a licensed deal. She mentioned in the post's caption that she will often ask vendors to stop selling the item, but “often the store just bought the items wholesale from somewhere else, and it's a tough situation because they had no ill will” (Shimizu). It was more difficult to retrieve examples of Ellis' attempts at calling out counterfeit use of his images, as previous examples may have been deleted. However, there was a post from April 12, 2018 where he tagged Coldstone Creamery and alerted them that they traced and reused some of his images for a campaign. “Normally I'd send an invoice to license my work, but in this case I'm asking you to make a donation to Inner City Arts to help underserved kids” (Ellis). Unfortunately, neither artist updated followers as to whether the companies reconciled the theft of original content, but both of them made their stances known to thousands of loyal followers across multiple platforms.

I'm curious as to whether anyone else has witnessed where any accounts that they follow attempted to call out a person or persons for stealing their work. What sort of consequences were there? What consequences do you think there should be? In the two cases I highlighted above, the artists made their stances known, but since the theft didn't occur on IG, there's nothing much that could be done. however, that wouldn't stop loyal followers from sharing and distributing the post, or from commenting on those other companies' accounts demanding that compensation is given to the artists.

                                                                Ello (he/him/his)

References:

Ellis, A. (n.d.). https://www.instagram.com/adamtots/. 

Shimizu, Y. (n.d.). https://www.instagram.com/yukoart/.