Hey buddy! Want to buy a Pissaro or Monet? You can get anything you want at Arch-world (www.arch-world.cn, a Chinese language site).

Well-known Canadian artist, Robert Genn got a call on December 1st from a subscriber to his newsletter, The Painters Keys*, saying that she had seen one of his works listed on the Arch-world site. Robert visited the site and found 112 of his images there; he had not licensed the copyrights of his work to Arch-world. When he discovered other artists whose work was being offered for sale on the Arch-world site in contravention of their copyrights, he got busy. There are 2800 international visual artists represented on the "made-to-order" Arch-world website.

Arch-world is a large operation. It has a huge website with an enormous inventory of images available for sale. Viewers can order what is essentially a giclée print of an image or, for more money, a hand-painted reproduction of the work by artisans trained in painting reproductions. The company is based in China, a country that is a member of the Berne Convention, an international agreement requiring signators to honour all creative and intellectual copyrights of co-signators. Robert contacted Canadian government authorities, but official channels were not able to do much, in spite of the fact that Robert's research indicated that there were eight hundred Canadian artists' images for sale on the Arch-world site.

Unsuccessful through official channels, Robert became a David to Arch-world's Goliath. First, when he discovered that it is terribly difficult to search the site to see if your image has been illegally appropriated, he built a search engine of his own to help artists see if they are on the site. Next, he wrote an editorial about the site and its copyright violations in his newsletter, a newsletter that goes to 135,000 artists in over one hundred countries. And he wrote to Arch-world. And re-wrote to them, and re-wrote to them.

His subscribers also started writing, assisted by links Robert provided on his website, and Arch-world got as many as one thousand emails on some days. Somewhat surprisingly, Robert's images were removed from the site. By Boxing Day, virtually all the living artists were gone from the site. Robert's army of letters had done the trick. Although a battle was won, the war is still on. "Diligence is required", Robert said when I talked with him, "when one place shuts down, another opens up". Indeed, Arch-world is building four new websites and who knows what they will be doing.

As I said, it was surprising that Arch-world succumbed to pressure. They did the right thing after first doing a wrong thing. Not all those who venture into copyright violations as a business are vulnerable to public pressure. Your copyrights are valuable and need protection. It is better to be diligent, as Robert suggests, and to work together as artists to defeat any future Goliaths that emerge than to fight in the courts. When copyright battles happen in the court system or worse, the international court system, no one wins except lawyers.