IP Intellectual Property Protection
Artists need to be very conscious that works of art can be forged very easily in the 21st century. Taking as many steps as possible to deter copies of your work will avoid breaches of your intellectual property.
6 Steps to Protect your IP Intellectual Property:
- Keep a record book with complete details of each and every artwork you’ve ever created for future reference.
- Take a Photograph of the work and keep the date, notes, measurements of the piece and a record of materials used if possible.
- Scan a digital version of the artwork also. Not only is this good to vital to protect your IP intellectual property but when it comes time to set up a website or someone asks you for your portfolio you will need a record at hand. Besides the IP issues I imagine, you’ll want a record of all your creations even if it’s just so you can reminisce when you’re 85 sitting on the rocking chair of life.
- Record the name, email address, and contact telephone number of people that you have sold your artwork to. For starters, you will want to build a mailing list which will lead to future sales but this also helps prove provenance if any issues of ownership ever pop up.
- Keep a consistent signature on artwork and always date work in the same way.
- There is a new cloud-based service called MyOws (My Original Works) that I reviewed several months ago that really makes recording your IP intellectual Property easy as uploading an image to their servers where your image is timestamped and a digital image is kept on file.