Internet Etiquette with Miss Madge

The designs I showed in my Show and Don't Tell Post below were mistakenly believed to be bracelets...they're actually necklaces. You can go back and look at them again with that in mind and I'll wait here. The beads on them are ginormous. Those plastic rounds are as big as a huge gum ball. In fact they look so much like a giant gum ball, someone might just try to pluck them off of my neck! The spines on the spine necklace are each over an inch long and when worn ruffle around your neck like a Rennaissance style collar. The coral in the primal choker is one to two inches long. I guess it might have helped for me to model them, but I've been so busy there's not been much time for gussying up! I finished a bracelet to go with the Mod Bubbles design yesterday along with a commissioned design for a book request. I'll show pics of me wearing them to CHA when I get back.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled blog post...

Internet Etiquette with Miss Madge

I wanted to take a moment to talk about copyrights here. Anything that I post here that isn't attributed to someone else is under my copyright. If you look down my sidebar you'll see I have a very specific notice that indicates you may not copy my posts or my images and you may not make derivative works from my images or my posts. If you like a design I've posted here or on my website and offered the directions and you make it, give credit where credit is due. You may make it for personal use, you may not make it and sell it on Etsy or at your local craft fair or anywhere else for that matter. You may not turn it into a class and make money on it without my explicit permission and a percentage of your fee! Now you might do it anyway and I might not catch you, but it's a karma thing baby. It may not seem like it, but when you do that you are stealing someone's intellectual property. It's in my mind not any different from walking into their house and stealing something from a shelf. It isn't yours. If I'm inspired by another designer as I was with the Lorraine Schwartz Beyonce choker, I give the name of that designer with the piece. I don't make exact copies of someone else's designs, I may use a technique I've seen elsewhere or do something that is informed by another design, but I don't steal. Just because it's posted on the internet doesn't make it free for the taking. The same goes for my website and for anyone else's blog or website unless they offer a different copyright notice. Once it's published, it's protected by the laws of copyright. That means my images, my text, my concepts, my branding and everything on my website and my blog from the page design to the images on the pages...the whole enchilada.

The internet is a bit like the Wild West. There aren't clear cut rules yet. There's a lot of shady stuff that goes on and a lot of rationalization that happens. There are a lot of folks riding into town toting six guns and taking whatever they please. It doesn't help that we can go to Google images and easily pluck whatever we like and plop it wherever we like and feel perfectly justified in doing so. It doesn't help that with a click of a mouse we can copy and paste anything that isn't locked up anywhere we like. I get that. I understand that it seems like if someone puts it out there, you should have free access to it. That's what's complicated about the internet, that's the struggle we're having now. It's particularly hard on artists because what we're peddling isn't soap flakes, it's our art work. We work hard on every aspect of our branding and if people feel they can just take it and make it theirs, we all lose. It means, don't watch pirated movies because the people who made that movie aren't making any money on their intellectual property when you do, it means don't download music without paying for it, it means don't download images and use them in your collages or artwork (I can tell you (because I've contacted the company that owns the rights) that Frida Kahlo's art work is not permission free my friends.) Remember that art is for those of us who make our living making it, a commodity. You may sell shoes, I sell ideas.

I know that a lot of folks don't know these things so I give everyone the benefit of the doubt. If I find someone has 'borrowed' my intellectual property, I'll diplomatically contact them and request that they cease and desist from said activity. It almost always ends up being a simple matter of internet etiquette confusion, but not always. You have the right to ask people not to copy your work. I'm embedding everything from here on out with either a blatant copyright image you can't remove or a watermark. So if you do 'borrow' it, it's going to be very clear that you didn't make it yourself.

My entire brand is about sharing with you the power of creativity to transform, elevate and inspire. I want you to trust your own artists's eye and to be inspired by the ideas I share to make it your own. I'm not a make the exactly same thing kinda craft expert. I truly believe that the more we trust our eye, the more we allow our own creative impulse to inform our work, the better our work will become. Most people operate from the lack mentality. In other words they feel that they lack the ability to succeed where other people possess it. Let me tell you a little secret, it's in all of us. The power to write your own story is within you. You can choose an adventure or a mystery, a romance novel or a thriller, a comedy or a tragedy and you can (if you so desire) write your own happy ending. Trust yourself. Give yourself permission to shine in your own uniquely beautiful way. It may appear that I'm there...wherever there is...but I am (as we all are) a work in progress and I'm not there yet. Walk your own path and remember that there is room enough in the sky for every star to shine.

"If someone loves a flower of which just one example exists among all the millions and millions of stars, that's enough to make him happy when he looks at the stars. He tells himself, 'My flower's up there somewhere...' But if the sheep eats the flower, then for him it's as if, suddenly, all the stars went out. And that isn't important?'" from Le Petit Prince Antoine de Saint-Exupery

xoxo
Madge