Painter Al Agnew is not an inveterate shopper, but he spends a fair amount of time looking through merchandise catalogues. So do a lot of other wildlife artists; these days, it's part of the job description that tends not to get mentioned very much. Agnew and his wife, Jane, who live in St. Genevieve, Missouri, receive catalogues from 25 or 30 companies and look through them for images of fish, wolves and other wildlife on a variety of products (watches, coasters, t-shirts, for instance) that look like his own artwork. Too often, they find something.
The artist sells original oil paintings, specializing in pictures of fish, wolves and other wildlife, as well as prints based on those paintings, but somewhat more than half of Agnew's income is generated from licensing images to dozens of companies for use on their products. Other companies, however, choose to just take the images without paying a licensing fee to the artist. "Lots of things have been pilfered over the years," Agnew said. "On the average, there are half a dozen a year that we find." The loss of revenue to the artist for those six stolen images would be "$150,000 a year, had we not found it." (The artist has no idea how much money is lost for unlicensed images they do not find.) But, at least, they find that many, keeping his Washington, D.C.-based lawyer, James Silverberg, busy tracking down the copyright infringers and arranging payments.
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