[MSN] B.C. painter finds cut-rate copies online

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B.C. painter finds cut-rate copies online
Dozens of knock-offs fetch fraction of price

PATRICK BRETHOUR

>From Friday's Globe and Mail

VANCOUVER — Vancouver artist Mike Svob's latest acrylic painting, East Side Snowfall, can be purchased from a Whistler gallery for $1,970.

Or you can spend five minutes on the Web and buy a knock-off for $11.70 (U.S.) from the appropriately named chinaoilpaintingwholesale.com, the latest in a string of Chinese websites that unabashedly copy Western art pilfered by replicating images from the Internet.

Nancy Svob was idly Googling her husband's name when she stumbled across the website, which offers bargain-basement rates for copied paintings from a huge number of artists.

The couple had thought only one or two of Mr. Svob's works were on the site, so the artist was shocked to hear that, in fact, 64 of his paintings were on offer — including several works that have yet to sell in their original form. “Oh, my Jesus ... 64, eh?” he said. “That's quite a few. They must have searched a little.”

Ersatz versions of hundreds of artists' work are sold through chinaoilpaintingwholesale.com, itself one of a constantly ebbing and flowing number of websites that offer knock-off paintings at low, low prices, and volume discounts. Canadian artist Don Li-Leger is among them; a legitimate print of his, Into the Light, is being sold elsewhere for $795, but on chinaoilpaintingwholesale.com a similar-sized knock-off oil painting can be had for $27.30 (U.S.).

Still, the notion that he has lots of company does little to dim Mr. Svob's misery. “They're stealing your creativity,” Mr. Svob said.

The counterfeit paintings are but one stroke on a larger canvas of artistic piracy in China, where DVDs, software and designer clothing are mimicked then sold for a fraction of their cost in Western stores.

The Chinese government launched a major drive against copyright infringement last year, but the entertainment industry coalition , the International Intellectual Property Alliance, still named the country as one of the world's worst offenders in 2006 — sharing that dubious honour with Russia — for a problem costing more than $2.2-billion.

“They're a piracy haven,” said entertainment lawyer Susan Abramovitch, a partner at Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP.

Ms. Abramovitch said the same principle is at stake when paintings, music, films or software are pirated, but that the financial damage from counterfeiting paintings is comparatively small.

Paintings are a latecomer to the piracy business, but the counterfeit art trade is thriving in China, with a single town in the country's south churning out $120-million of artwork last year.

The copying process is a mixture of high and low tech. Photo images of the paintings are copied from across the Web, and then placed into a searchable database. Once an order is placed, those downloaded images are used as a guide for a Chinese artist to paint the copy by hand.

Mr. Svob's predicament is all too familiar to Robert Genn, another B.C. artist whose work was copied and sold for a fraction of its value on a similar website a year ago. He said Canadian artists were unaccountably popular on that site, making up nearly a quarter of the 4,000 artists whose works were being counterfeited. An aggressive letter-writing campaign got Canadian works expunged from that site, but the problem continues to resurface, he said. “Copyright means the right to copy over there.”

More worrisome for Mr. Svob is that this latest website is in English, and the pirated wares are priced in U.S. currency, opening up the prospect that the works may be shipped to North America — hitting his pocketbook much more directly.

For its part, chinaoilpaintingwholesale.com has remarkably straightforward sales pitch for its illicit goods. The site offers a “100 per cent hand painted guarantee” and promises to “paint any image, any size.”

The site's registration information indicates that it is less than a week old, but the Hong Kong company that owns the site, D&L Art Ltd., already has the images of thousands of paintings available, including world-famous works such as Pablo Picasso's Guernica. And the site offers to reproduce “any favourite images.”

The site has no reference to copyright issues, with one exception. At the bottom of every page, chinaoilpaintingwholesale.com prominently asserts its own copyright.

Ling Lin, an employee of D&L, said the company plans soon to include a notice that it honours copyright. “We'll put those words on the website,” she said, but wasn't able to explain why the site was launched without such a notice.

She also said the company planned to scrutinize its database of 6,000 paintings for copyright infringement “today or tomorrow,” but was not able to say why the paintings were being offered for sale before such an inspection. She said they would remove any work of art if told by an artist that it is copyrighted.

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