Art Thief

[lydiapenn]

So there's an art thief stirring up deviantART.com and i'm wondering, in the end what can you really do to someone like that?

the photo gallery host has agreed to take down the thousands of photos that this thief had posted in his gallery for online sales. but what's to stop that punk from just uploading them to another gallery host?

i found the whois for the thief's website but it's anonymous. what else can be done to find the thief's real identity? i'm just looking for comments and thoughts here that i can pass on to my friends. none of my art was stolen, i'm just mad for their sake.

here is a link to the main site of the thief and [for now at least] there's a sidebar with links to the photo galleries of stolen artwork. http://www.russianparties.com/index-3.html

[Steelsun]

Well, if you can find who his host is, and they are US based, you can send them a note citing the DMCA to pull down his site/disable it/etc for copyright infringment.

Even many other countries like the UK, etc will cooperate with a US DMCA request.

If it's hosted in Russia though, you may be out of luck.

Depending how his sales are processed, you can also contact his merchant service (or paypal, if he's using it) and report the person is trading in stolen merchandise and copyrighted items. They'll disable his account also and not release any funds that may be in it.

[Steelsun]

Looks like Godaddy may be the host also.
So send a letter to them.