Copyright

  • All images, videos, texts and content on sallytrace.com are copyrighted © 2000-present by Sally Trace.

  •  All rights of reproduction belong to the artist Sally Trace.  Do not copy, make derivative works or use Sally's art, written words or photographs in any way without written permission.  Always ask first, please.

  • If you wish to license Sally's art for printed or other published works, please use the contact form below or send an email to obtain permission. I've had my art used by organizations to represent spiritual, uplifting and diversity-inclusive concepts including biodiversity, and I'm especially receptive to licensing my art for these types of uses.

  • Image rights holders have a legal right to remove their images from any website that has published a copyrighted image without permission, including Pinterest and other image sharing sites.  And we have good reason to do this because stealing occurs via scraping, copying and hot linking, and it can spin out of control very quickly.  When this happens, it causes an artists work to appear to be in the public domain, and then the infringements can proliferate like wildfire.

  • I work hard to protect my copyrights.

  • Copyright infringement is not a victimless crime.  It devalues the art and robs the artist of valuable time and especially of inspiration, because every new creation will require countless future unpaid hours of work to keep the thievery even a little bit under control.

  • If you have had a "pin" removed from Pinterest, it's because I've had that image removed from the site for infringements. Pinterest will send you a copyright notification even if you innocently repinned that image.  This is something I can't control.  I have to have these images removed from the web for many types of infringement that occur both on and off Pinterest.

  • If you see Sally's art being "sold" anywhere other than on www.sallytrace.com or Pixels/Fineartamerica.com, then know it is likely fraud. Many fraudulent websites use art to entice their victims to click. They hotlink our artists images from our websites, Pinterest and other legitimate websites in order to come up in search results for an artists work.  Then when the artists try to have the scammer sites removed from our search results we are only reporting our own content.  In addition to preying on their consumer victims, the scammers also harm an artists ability to sell their art on the web.

  • Because hotlinking is not technically considered infringement, it's not possible to file a DMCA takedown for hotlinked images even when the scammers use the artists name, painting titles, descriptions and images to steal the artists search ranking and then to "sell" counterfeit art to the consumer.  Scammers exploit this loophole to steal from living artists.  It's incredibly frustrating and causes search results to be rife with fraud.  It's depressing and it's also impossible to keep up with as far as I know.  If someone can educate me as to how to fight this, PLEASE write to me.  As it is now, whenever I try to get these fraudulent search results removed, I not only fail to have the thieves' many websites removed from searches for my art, but I also do harm to my own standing in search.

  • ... so be careful where you click please.  I'm doing my best to have scammers who steal my images removed from search results, but they pop up faster that I can remove them.  Please be careful because the big search engine does nothing to protect users from clicking on links using stolen art images that redirect to scammer websites.  There is a huge number of these fraudulent listings right now.

  • For art teachers especially, please educate your students and yourselves in regard to copyright.  Only the rights holder of that image has the right to reproduce a work of art. If an unauthorized copy gets posted on the internet or on any other public place, it is infringement and will be removed whenever possible.  Derivative works are also bound by copyright.  Artists are entitled to earn income and benefit from reproductions of their own work; other people are not. Always ask for permission first please, for any living artist. If your students become artists when they grow up, do you think they will want to have some kind of control in how their images get used all around the planet?

Contact Sally