MY COPYRIGHT

Over the years, a lot (and I mean a lot) of my work has been stolen, plagiarized, posted online in Facebook Groups or on Social Media platforms, thousands of wallpaper sites and people passing my work off as their own.

I use many tools to find the misuse of my work, these will be listed below, but first, here is my copyright statement:

None of my work can be used, printed, broadcast or posted online anywhere without my express written permission. Doing so will breach copyright and/or Intellectual Property law and I will seek legal methods to take the work(s) down and seek compensation (if I am out of pocket from any artwork that is usually sold.) If you would like to use my work or feature it, you must contact me via email asking for permission. I will then consider granting permission. Failure to do this with any of my work(s) can and will result in legal action against you or subject to takedown requests, and/or both, as well as contacting either of the following: The place or platform my work has been illegally used, your ISP/Hosting Provider if my work has hosted anywhere online. Any or all Social Media Platforms will be contacted using their copyright infringement forms, the local authorities in your country will also be contacted if you fail to comply with my copyright rights.

Deliberately removing a copyright notice (or metadata identifying the owner) from a work you don’t own or have rights to use is illegal and constitutes copyright infringement, leading to potential fines and/or legal action against you. Copyright exists automatically with the creation of original or recreation of the work(s) and the removal shows an intent to steal the work, even without the © symbol present. Although ALL of my work have the © copyright symbol either written or typed on the artwork, and/or embedded via it’s Metadata and an invisible and unremovable Digital Watermark.

HOW MY WORK IS PROTECTED

ALL of my works are embedded with unremovable and invisible watermarks via Digimarc, Pixsy, and are copyright registered with SafeCreative and Adobe Content Credentials. The attempted removal of any of these methods will breach my copyright and is illegal worldwide.

All of my work(s) are also hash protected from the original work(s). This ensures my copyright of the original work via Data Integrity. More on hashes here, here & here. Everything I create and share are logged in a database with the original hash, proving the time and date of it’s creation. They look like this:

CRC32: 962ADA3E
MD5: 54111995D207E9B017F75D1935137BFD
SHA-1: 15CD9038F081FE2C37763DBFDEF95D0466F5900B

The number for each type of hash is unique to each of the original work(s). Any changes made to my work(s), however small, means the artwork has been stolen or altered when compared. This breaches my copyright.

SHARING OF MY WORK

As stated… Sharing my work requires permission. Even if I grant you permission, my work(s) remains my copyright. Any work(s) I create will always remain my copyright, even if I create artwork or media for you. This copyright can be purchased, and I will transfer copyright over to you (there is a fee involved for this). If you’re just wanting to use my work for a project or to share, you do not own the work or the copyright and you must still adhere to my copyright rights and stipulations.

ALTERING, MODIFYING, OR POSTING MY WORK ONLINE

You may not alter, change, composite, remove my name or copyright, resize, crop, merge, add your own text over the top, change its metadata in any way (All my work’s originals are hashed to prove the original work) as well as embedded with unremovable watermarks.

All of my works are tracked anywhere they are uploaded online. They are tracked using various methods that protect them from usage, from change, or illegally posting them online without my permission. If you post them online to a Social Media site like a Private Facebook Group, I am still informed of the online usage and the exact place, post or page where the image is and who posted it. This also goes for locked or private profiles or websites that have search engine crawling disabled. You cannot hide my work if used illegally. I will know, and I will take action against you. Fair Use does not count with stolen work(s) or for work(s) used without permission. Nor does trying to hide your identity. It’s useless. As a former digital computer forensic examiner, I can tell you one thing for certain. You’re not as hidden as you might believe. Anonymity is an illusion, only believed by fools.

So, to save yourself from any repercussions, contact me for usage permission.

A.I. USAGE OF MY WORK

No generative artificial intelligence (A.I.) was used in the creation of my work. I expressly prohibit any entity from using my works for purposes of training A.I. technologies to generate text or images, including without limitation technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as said works. The I reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative A.I. training and development of machine learning language models, of which will never be granted. Using any of my works without my permission for any reason, including the aforementioned A.I. will breach my copyright and/or intellectual property.

Michael Knight