There is a site which autamatically leaks your content on patreon if you don’t have the ‘‘charge upfront’’ option enabled. And even if you have ‘‘Charge upfront’’ enabled, it offers to leakers an option to easily import ALL your content if they support you on certain tier. Example: if your content is for +$5 patrons, and there is a $5 supporter that knows that site, he can easily leak all your contnt of your patreon page.
I don’t know if im allowed to post that site here, so i won’t just in case unless staff tell me to post it.
To avoid the automatic leak of your exclusive content, i recommend you uploading a cropped image of your pic, and sending the full version via PM. Sadly, it doesn’t help when someone really wants to leak your content and upload the pic that you sent him/her via PM.
adding a script that puts the name of the patron who’s downloading (or even accessing) content that is tagged for “patrons only” would be almost trivial from the programming side of things. The problem, however, would be that such a visible watermark could just as easily be cropped out again.
Aside from the question I always raise on “is fighting illegal copying worth the investment, compared to what you could produce in the same time for your real supporters” (and this being a discussion on its own), I think that only a “real” watermark system, i.e. one that would embed an ID (and be it the patron’s name) into the compression scheme of the downloaded JPEG or by as (invisible) color deviations, so that the ID can not be cropped and does survive rescaling of the image as well as recompression, would be the only way to go.
This, however, would require you - or whoever wants to read out the ID after finding a copy somewhere - to use the same watermarking software to “decode” it, so this way is somewhat more of an investment both on Patreon’s side and on yours.
I don’t know if copying the thumbnails/previews is a problem for you. If you don’t mind about those, one solution could be that you host the hires files yourself and just add that watermark workflow through that.
You know, for a long time, I fought against people reposting my stuff. I watermarked. I hid content behind a registration wall that made people promise not to repost what they saw. I filed DMCA complaints daily. Nothing works. People who are assholes are determined to be assholes.
Here’s what I do now: I resize my images to web resolution, just large enough to display well on screen—and make for a crappy print, for those who think they’re gonna grab my images and plaster them on products at Zazzle or CafePress. I don’t worry about what happens to the low-res images after that. Occasionally, I stumble on someone doing something uncool with my work, like selling bad prints of it, or reposting it without credit. Sellers get reported. Reposters get a comment saying “hey, that’s my art” with a link to my site.
On Patreon, pretty much everything I post is Public. There’s no incentive to repost work, because it’s right there, for everyone to see.
I’d rather spend my time making new work than chasing down assholes. I just can’t burn the energy on those people.
well … what I was talking about above was all automatic, no manual work involved. However, what Lisa said is pretty much inline with what I didn’t dare to say (but hinted at). Try finding a compromise that allows you to concentrate on the good things, the productive side in life … not on fights you cannot win in the long run anyway.
