But the company that stole Phelps's dachshund and pasted it on shirts and mugs must've thought he would never notice, or never care.
Teedino, they call themselves. They swiped the image, fiddled with the contrast filter, cropped it, and stuck it underneath a lame slogan. Only a public shaming and a harshly worded email made them stop. But it's happened before, and Phelps knows it'll happen again.
This type of art-crime is not on the level of, say, boosting priceless Vermeers from a museum. But it's safe to say that we are in a golden age for a new mode of art theft — less glamorous, but with a cleaner getaway. And area artists are finding out that they had better learn how to catch the thieves themselves.
The internet facilitates this nasty practice. Phelps, for his part, has figured out how to turn it back to his advantage. He found the dachshund hijack via a Google image search — the mind-bending new tool that our information overlords have cooked up for us. When he found the obvious theft, a swiftly organized outrage party roasted the offender online.
This kind of crowdsourced vigilantism is his main option. He has threatened legal action before, but never needed to follow through. He's thankful that it's never come to that. "People always say, 'You should sue them!' But that's not feasible for many artists."
He's a step ahead.
She contacted Amazon, assuming that the corporation would not allow blatant theft of her work. She was wrong.
"Amazon does not care," Juul said. "It went absolutely nowhere.
"If the goods are being made in China or Russia, they are allowing it to happen," she says. This makes a sick kind of sense, given the flimsiness of international copyright protections. Why in the world would Amazon pressure Juul's enemies to take the goods down? Hell, Russian vendors pay fees, too.
Her talks with Amazon turned spookier and spookier. One message informed her that "[w]hen you add your copyrighted image to any detail page, you grant Amazon and its affiliates a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to exercise all rights of publicity over the material."
Her art was no longer hers.
Stunned, she no longer deals with Amazon. Since then she has watched the decor side of her income dwindle from about 8 percent to about 2 percent.
Messages to vendors like "GawrylukEwa" selling Juul's designs were not returned. Repeated calls to Amazon returned a "press information" line — which is not a working number. But as for Amazon's policies, Juul warns that its User Agreement speaks for itself.
Yeah, she's angry — and there's plenty to go around.
"Whatever else you can say about Trump, he is going after international copyright infringement," she says. "They're stealing military secrets, they're stealing patents — so my little pillow is not a big deal to them. But it's a big deal to me!"
So far, Trump's administration has taken — wait for it — no concrete actions against the global intellectual property theft he decried in his campaign. But Juul's wrath speaks to a fascinating intersection between the interests of an abstract painter and, say, an Ohio steelworker. Each may find hope in a turn toward more protective trade policies.
Certainly Juul is not the only creative type affected. A blue-ribbon group called the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property put the U.S.'s annual losses from such theft at $300 billion. That's a lot of pillows.
St. Petersburg artist Chad Mize has run into similar problems as Phelps and Juul, on both local and national levels. The understandable anger is there, but he has complicated feelings toward the issue. After all, his own St. Pete "World Tour" t-shirt was partly inspired by a logo he saw hyping tiny Torrance, Calif. — the artistic process can bleed borrowing and robbery together in an indistinguishable blur.
The obvious and careless swipes of the design around his own hometown can irk him, though he chooses not to make a big issue out of it. But the fate of his Sesame Street-esque "Bernie" image was thornier. The image went viral last year (my God, was the Bern only last year?). He loved seeing the image get adopted, even co-opted, all over the place.
He drew the line, like Phelps, when strangers were making money off of it directly. He found a man in Atlanta selling products with the "Bernie" face on eBay.
"He said he purchased the licensed design from a guy in Israel for $100," Mize says. His logo had been conveniently snipped from the image.
The vendor sent an apologetic letter, and the shirt was taken down. Even an artist of Mize's profile had to hope legal action wouldn't be necessary. It hasn't been — yet.
In the end, a certain amount of insecurity is being accepted by artists who choose to post their work on the internet — at a loss for other options in today's marketplace. "It's sort of the Wild West, a calculated risk," Phelps says. "You have to police your image." No one else will do it for them, and the web is always hungry.
This article appears in May 18-25, 2017.