Rant - They're having a laugh!

Not a day goes by when I don't hear a story of some artist whose images have been stolen from their website. The most famous recent case can be read here. Each day one artist or another doesn't get paid, fobbed off or told that the profits this month haven't been good so they'd get paid another day!

Can you imagine telling your plumber, 'sorry, I didn't make enough money this month, so I'll pay you next month, the month after, or maybe never'? I can imagine what the plumber would say. (I doubt I'd get away with using this sort of language on my blog...)

Thing is there are two types of artists, the ones who run it as a business and the ones who are grateful for every illustration, image, greeting card sold. The first have confidence in their work and it's value, the others seemingly don't. The thing is, if your image does sell it's obviously worth it. And usually someone else is making money from it. So shouldn't you be making money from it? Why should you be working for free? There's always the small claims court.

Oh, and then there are portfolio websites (badly and amateurishly designed) who want to charge us for registration AND any sales we make, the art contests and portfolio books who want to charge us an arm and a leg just to look at our images,... and so on. They're all having a laugh and a porsche at OUR cost.

It's time for us to stand up and be counted. It's not right for people to take us for mugs. We provide a service and should be paid for it.

Any tips, suggestions, rants - feel free to comment!