Thank you for visiting the Artist Legal Alliance.  For over seven years, the ALA worked to help enforce and protect the copyrights of tattoo flash artists world-wide on the internet.  Unfortunately, the Artist Legal Alliance has made the difficult choice to completely cease all operations and ultimately end this practice.  Our reasoning behind this tough decision involves the difficult and ever-changing landscape of copyright protection and enforcement on the internet.  The complexities of this legal area make the ALA’s goal of seeking out, preventing, and persecuting distributors of bootleg flash nearly impossible to achieve.  Specifically, three primary issues stood in the way of our organization’s goal:

eBay Policy and Current Legal Precedent

Undoubtedly, the majority of bootlegged flash distribution the ALA attempted to  address was that found in photocopied sheets and mass produced CD-ROMs made available on eBay.  Like all US-based websites, eBay is required to comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in regards to the prevention of distribution of copyrighted material via their website.  Specifically, eBay must be presented with a specifically-formatted DMCA takedown notice from the copyright holder (or someone with the authority to act on their behalf), before they will consider removing a bootleg flash auction.  This means that if you want to protect your works from unscrupulous sellers on eBay, you must independently seek-out bootleg flash auctions, determine if your works are present in the auction, compose and submit the notice to eBay, and monitor the results.  Because of the proliferation of counterfeit goods on eBay, this must happen daily, sometimes multiple-times per day.  Once eBay receives a takedown notice in compliance with the DMCA, eBay will remove the auction, but oftentimes it is too late, as the auction has completed and the bootlegger has already sold the goods.

eBay policies only satisfy the bare minimum required to comply with US law in regards to their handling of bootlegged goods .  This is often completely ineffective.  To add insult to injury, eBay still makes money off of these counterfeited goods with every completed auction. 

To make matters worse, a recent high-profile legal case (Tiffany (NJ) Inc. and Tiffany and Company vs. eBay Inc.) that attempted to fault eBay for not properly preventing bootlegs as well as profiting off of them finally ended in eBay’s favor.

eBay is in compliance with the law, but they will need to do much more than that if they have any interest in ending the proliferation of bootleg goods via their systems.   Until then, those who want to protect their copyrighted artwork on eBay must go through the ineffective process of continually issuing takedown notices and hoping that eBay processes and enforces them in time.  This oftentimes fruitless effort makes the prevention of bootleg tattoo flash sales on eBay nearly impossible.

Authority to Represent Copyright Holders

No matter where or how on the illegal flash is being distributed on the internet, the DMCA’s broad stroke recourse for copyright-holders is the takedown notice: a special letter sent to those distributing the copyrighted information asking them to take them down.   If you hold the copyrights to your work, you may issue a takedown notice to the service or website distributing them against your wishes.  The enforcement of copyright is the burden of the copyright holder.

The Artist Legal Alliance owns no copyrights to any tattoo flash artwork.  It is authorized to act on the behalf of some artists, but to act on behalf of ALL tattoo flash artists, the ALA would need to gain authorization from each artist before they can enforce their copyrights.  Even if you report a copyright issue to us, we cannot follow through until we have the legal authorization to do so.  In addition, all of the copyright owners for these illegally distributed collections of flash must be identified, as well as each specific instance of infringement. For the ALA to arrange agreements with copyright holders and get the necessary information in this regard is a tremendous amount of work and paper shuffling overhead that we were not capable of performing.

Lack of Resources

There is a joke: “The only one who wins when something goes to court is the lawyers.”  While this may or may not be true, the subtext of the joke suggests that it is the legal system itself that has the most to gain from any legal battle.  To enforce a copyright in a court of law requires tremendous amounts of money, time and yes, lawyers.  The Artist Legal Alliance, being a free, volunteer run organization, simply did not have the resources to fully pursue significant cases of copyright violation.

What You Can Do

Despite the end of the ALA, all hope is not lost.  As we mentioned earlier, according to law, the burden of enforcement is on the copyright holder. If you created your works of art, you are the copyright holder, and you can enforce your own copyright.  Should you come across an instance where your tattoo flash artwork is being distributed or used outside the bounds of fair use, here is a list of things you can do.  Please note that this is not official legal advice.

1. Keep calm and contact the alleged bootlegger.   They may not even know you own the copyrights to the works they are distributing (or much about copyright law generally).  Simply notifying someone that they are using artwork you own without permission may be enough.  Don’t be aggressive, just let them know.  In our experience the majority of the time this is all it takes to end the illegal distribution of your tattoo artwork.

2. Contact the host or provider of the works.  The website, server, web application, or otherwise the place where the works are being distributed have a responsibility to comply with the DMCA.  Oftentimes, their own terms of service will state that those that use their services must respect copyrights, trademarks, and intellectual property rights. If you can’t get the person who is doing it directly, contact one of the people who are helping to make it happen.  This is oftentimes very effective.

3. Send a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice.  This is the final recourse.   We highly advise you to get in touch with a lawyer to help you format and direct this letter.  An ignored, properly formatted and legal DMCA takedown notice will mean that the perpetuator of the work is now opening himself up to being taken to court.

4. Finally, it never hurts to register the copyrights to your works federally via the U.S. Copyright office.

Final Thoughts

While the Artist Legal Alliance may have ended, the challenges of protecting tattoo flash artwork copyrights on the internet persist.  We will continue to closely follow the intellectual property world in this regard and suggest you do the same.  Our hope is that one day a better balance is found between protecting the works of copyright holders and the promotion of innovation essential for the internet to work.

One final thing to say: Thank you to all of the volunteers and artists who helped make our efforts possible over the years and aggressively helped us pursue our mission.  While the end result may be less then satisfying, the lessons learned and the camaraderie formed will always be of value.  Good luck, and keep drawing!