I urge everyone to use these techniques. It is incredibly important to find your work if someone is ripping it...They could be selling it!

There are a number of different things you can try, here are just a few of them:




Thanks to *gwennafran for bringing this tool to my attention: [link]


The tool is called TinEye and can be found here: [link] and all you have to do is make a free account on there to start searching for your images. I discovered 117 rips on photobucket alone from just ONE of my pictures.


What is Tineye?
TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where and how that image appears on the web, or to find modified or edited versions.



How does it work?
TinEye’s spiders crawl the web regularly for images. Using sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for each image that is added to the index. When you submit a search image to TinEye, its fingerprint is analyzed on-the-fly and compared to the fingerprint of every single image in the TinEye search index. The result is a detailed list of websites using that image, or modifications of that image.



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I DIDN'T FIND ANYTHING!

Here are some more steps if TinEye doesn't work:

USING GOOGLE


1) Go to google.com and type in your dA username, then -site:deviantart.com. This will display a list of files on other websites containing your username, for example; ikilledmyelegance –site:deviantart.com. You may find people selling your artwork saying, “this is an original by ikilledmyelegance for sale”. You can also do this with the title’s of your artworks, just replace your username with the title and search the websites selling artwork with the same title. If you wanted to search for an exact phrase then put it in double quotation marks, for example; if I wanted to search for Lauren Finn I may not get the two words together, but if I search for "Lauren Finn" It'll show me that exact result.

2) To see if someone’s reported your work in the dA forums just go to google.com and type in your username followed by site:deviantart.com for example; ikilledmyelegance site:deviantart.com. It will display a list of locations with the username mentioned. You may find useless things like where you’ve commented, so you’ll have to edit the search again and put in ‘-:ico'nyourusernamehere:’ (remove the comma in the middle)for example, altogether it will look like; ikilledmyelegance site:deviantart.com -:ico'nikilledmyelegance: (remove the comma in the middle). That shall minimize your search a little and get results that you want. If there’s anything else you notice that keeps popping up, just copy and paste it into the search bar along with everything else and put a minus (-) next to it, then click search.

USING META TAGS AND FILE INFO


3) Of course people may not mention your username or they may change your art work’s title. There’s a trick to find your artwork on google without either of those two things, the secret is hidden in the file info. All you have to do is (when you save your artwork on photoshop or most adobe programs) is go to file > file info and enter in keywords that you can search for your picture with. You can also add copyright notices. There’s a tonne of secret information that isn’t visible to the eye without a program, so they probably won’t think to change the information. Usually when people steal artwork they right click and just save it, keeping the keywords etc, so you can search for those keywords you entered into your file on google later on.

STOLEN FROM YOUR OWN WEBSITE?


4) Depending on your hosting, there is sometimes an option in the admin control panel to see if someone is hotlinking your pictures that are uploaded to your website, you can also add javascript that doesn’t allow people to right click no your page. This can allow them to still look at the source code, but if you structure your html img tags pulling your images from your own server; example: image.jpg, not www .blergh.com/image.jpg then it makes it very hard for them to find the exact location of the image to pull into another page to save, or to directly hotlink it.

SO HOW DO I STOP THEM?


5) First if you want them to remove it, be nice, but assertive. Try to find their contact page and email them asking NICELY to take it down, if there is no contact page then you need to find out who hosts their website (it’s a little more difficult if they host from home, but we’ll talk about that in a second). Go to a whois lookup website like ww [link] and type in the website and search. It should have information on who hosts the domain etc, that way you can visit the hosting’s website and make a complaint. Your complaint should be handled within a week.
If someone hosts from home then just look at the domain name info, you can make a complaint to the people who host the domain aswell. If THAT’S hosted by them also then by law they need to provide their contact information ie: a name, address, phone number and email address. You can contact them through there. If all of that fails, then contact copyright officials (you need to find your country’s copyright page on google) and report them through there. Or visit your local police station if fraud is concerned.




- [link] Here's a forum thread that explains the minusing sites a little better.

- [link] Here's how to disable javascript.

- [link] Here's a link to a domain name lookup

- [link] There's a link if you wish to copyright something in Australia

- Credit to for teaching me the google tricks.

If you have any other suggestions, feel free to comment and I'll add it.