Don’t forget though there are different copyright laws in the US to the UK , Europe and Canada. In the UK the old adage is to send yourself by recorded / registered delivery a photograph or text etc of the work of art and not to open it. If there is a copyright issue the unopened package can be produced at court with your origional receipt to etablish the date you produced a copy of the work. In the 1970s all published books and magazined still had to send six copies of each publication to the British Museum Library

If you are talking about raw photographic images decent cameras will provide embeded data that not only records the date & time you took the image but also the GPS location (can sometimes be switched off) so keeping the original ‘RAW’ image with this data is a safe place is essential.

The trouble is that despite all of this there are many flagrant copyright breaches.

The other side of the coin are the attempts to copyright things that are in the public domain eg: the London skyline and countryside, together with the claiming copyright for all images taken in a location and the likes of Facebook and many competitions.

In the example quoted in the original post my immediate reaction was that the originals were in the style of something or heavily influenced by something I had seen many years ago and this is the real difficulty with all art pieces: inspiration comes from everywhere. Most artists view as much art as possible (school of famous artist produced work like the artist and often collaborated in their work). When I did my MA I was heavily influenced by images, style and reasoning that I saw on the course. Prior to that my style was similar to other photographers who had been around in 40s-70s.

…And most artists like to influence people…

The differences between ‘influenced by’, ‘in the style of’, and ‘plagurised from’ are often small.

http://www.tubetorial.com/blogger-law-101/

And I also love the very precise wording on the Vogue article: “it came to our attention that Samantha’s work bears too much resemblance to that of other designers and illustrators”

will be passing it along to my students when we have our copyright discussion!

As a web developer, let me just say: ignore this. It affords no protection, and just irritates users who wish to access the context menu in their web browser for any one of the ten or fifteen legitimate reasons which don’t involve ripping off your work.

Also, I found it slightly puzzling that there was no mention of the DMCA at all, given this post’s obvious US orientation. A (proper) DMCA takedown notice is generally the first step prior to sending a Cease & Desist where online infringement is concerned: sending a C&D without paying attention to the finer points of the DMCA will make it very very difficult for you to carry out your claim of infringement. A good lawyer will advise you of the proper process given the particular circumstances involved, though.