Art theft

Update: This guy is now banned from DeviantArt :)

Hey everyone,

Ever since I have started digital painting and posting my work up online, I have always heard a lot about art theft - and now it has happened to me.

Recently I was notified by some other great and helpful artists that my work had been stolen (along with many other artworks from other artists). This guy had the nerve to remove all of the copyrights and signatures from all the artwork that he stole including mine. I usually add quite a few watermarks to all of my images especially the ones I post on Deviant Art and I was amazed at how someone would go through all of that trouble just to steal an image. He may have also downloaded the image from CG society since I used to not always add a lot of watermarks to those images and the images are also a bit larger there since there is a upload size requirement. I recently added more watermarks to the images in that gallery due to all of this.

Here is a link to the persons gallery who stole my artwork: http://seulementlart.deviantart.com/art/light-blue-150501148

I urge anyone who recognizes any other artists work in his gallery to report him and alert the artists of this. I was only able to recognize a few but I'm pretty sure his whole gallery was stolen.

Here is a link to the original in my gallery: http://cellesria.deviantart.com/art/Light-Blue-149165184

Aside of this recent discovery. I had also noticed my work posted up on a few blogs/websites with no credit given to me.

A artist friend of mine recently told me of this feature of Photoshop that I had never heard of before called "Content-Aware Fill" that seems like both a blessing and a curse. I tried out this feature myself and was amazed and shocked by how effective it was. I actually took one of my images and was able to remove my copyright so easily which worries me further. If it is this easy to remove watermarks with this feature then it's possible that art theft will increase (or at least become easier). I guess the only thing I can do now (if I want to continue to share my images online) is to just upload smaller lower res images along with adding a lot of watermarks.

I know I can't prevent it completely but I can make it more annoying and tedious for them to steal.