anipan has been open for five days now, and during this time we have been listening very closely to your feedback. In this blog, we’re announcing several new functions that have just been integrated into anipan, which are a response to the feedback we’ve received during the beta release.

One of our goals is to make it ever-more difficult for people to steal artwork and claim it as their own. This might sound like a conflict of interest when we’re working so hard to present artwork in higher resolutions than ever, but we’re proposing a few ways to deal with it.

We started with the magnify overlay, which was introduced during the alpha release last month.

路地裏のおとしもの by 仮眠

On the outside, it might appear to be strictly a nifty way to zoom into detail – and it kind of is. You can dive into the artwork to enjoy the artist’s ultra-fine brush strokes, clothing details, and things you simply can’t see in a compressed, scaled-down image. When you visit an exhibition or gallery, you can almost get away with pressing your face against the artwork – and we’re doing our best to capture that here.

What might not be evident is what’s actually going on behind the scenes. When you zoom into an image like the one above, you’re actually seeing many small images arranged side-by-side to give the illusion of a huge piece of artwork. When an artist uploads their work in high resolution, the original piece is sliced up by one of our servers – making it much more difficult for people to snatch the source file. Plus, because we’ve put all of this behind a small viewing window (which fortunately works wonders for peering into the image), it makes it extremely difficult and tedious to screenshot and piece together the high-resolution image. And as a bonus, right-clicking on the image won’t get you anywhere.

With a reduced risk of theft, our aim is to give you, as an artist, more confidence in uploading your higher resolution artwork.

We’ve also made share buttons standard. Why? Because people are going to share artwork anyway, wherever it appears. And if the artwork is going to be shared, it’s only right that the original author should be credited for the piece, with a return link included.

When artwork is shared, you’ll see a notice appear on the page for that piece. In the next update to the anipan café, artists will be able to track who shared it – and we’re working on trying to track exactly where it was shared.

For artists who are less interested in showing their artwork in high resolutions and more interested in security, we’ve just released two new updates:

Gray by bao

When uploading artwork, you now have the option to give right-clickers a surprise. When a piece of artwork is right clicked, dragged onto a desktop, or saved in some other way, the saved version will contain a permanent url for that piece, your user id# (since usernames can change, whereas your id# is fixed), the anipan logo, and a subtle copyright symbol in the center of the image. The image is also slightly reduced in size – a maximum resolution of 750 pixels in width, rather than 1,000. Plus, the filename includes information about where to find you.

We decided not to disable right click, because we believe it will encourage people to screenshot your artwork. The above method increases the chance of your credit being maintained when the artwork is saved to an art appreciator’s hard drive or uploaded elsewhere.

Goldfish Bride by Naguri

If you prefer, you can set the image that displays on anipan to be the watermarked version, giving your artwork the smallest chance of being taken and re-used elsewhere without credit.

The facts:

Art theft is something that cannot be avoided. There are tools out there to remove watermarks, there are very patient people who will screenshot your image pixel-by-pixel, there are some who will scan your 300dpi art books and prints, and there are those who will take photos of works in exhibitions.

However, the average art thief is an opportunist – if they have to spend more than a few seconds trying to take a piece of artwork, they won’t bother. That’s why we’re working so hard to establish barriers between art thieves and unaltered artwork, making it much harder to steal artwork posted at anipan. If art thieves know it’s easier to steal artwork posted at other art sites, perhaps they’ll go there instead.

Our suggestion is just to enjoy being an artist and have confidence in posting your artwork to anipan. We’ll do our very best to continue stamping down on things while presenting your artwork beautifully.

For the record:

Copyright infringement, including tracing (which should not be permitted anywhere), is strictly prohibited at anipan. If you see it, please help us out and click the “report artwork” link below the piece’s related works.