Art Theft and You

I think if a person is just new and doesn't know, that they should be afforded some leniency as long as they don't do it again.

But some people know exactly what they're doing, and just want the temporary fame they'll get so long as no one catches on. I think it's pretty low to try and take credit for another person's hard work. It's just like plagiarism.

 

When I use somebody's art for something, I generally ask. I pretty much edit existing images, but I take those from either Bulbapedia or a wiki of some sort. If I use somebody else's, I ask.

 

I hate this. I've seen it so many times and had it happen to me several times as well. There's almost nothing in the art world as aggravating as having someone take your art and either edit the copyright out, or steal the whole thing to post as their own. I've had people blatantly trace my art too. It's something that always instantly makes me mad.

Art theft was actually the reason I joined DeviantArt, for those of you who know I'm there. A friend tipped me off about someone posting my art as their own so I made an account quick to report them, as did many of my friends. The person took them down or got banned, I forget which now since that was a good while back. Though since then I've had to report others for the same thing, ugh. And it's happened on other sites I'm on too. *face/palm*

 

People have stolen my art a bunch of times, and have even tried to sell it on eBay and at conventions without my permission. Having art stolen really sucks, and I try to call out art thieves whenever I can. My art is still stolen and reposted on a somewhat regular basis, which really sucks. I don't like people who repost art without giving credit to the original artist, it's really disrespectful, and the artist loses a lot of potential viewers because of them.

 

I've seen that happen. A few people have run booths at cons selling stolen art, they make money off other peoples work which is :/

There's even some people who's art has been used in magazines without permission and without credit.

 

I never got my art stolen but I know it's not good when they use your art without giving credit

 

I wouldn't particularly mind if I'm not credited when someone uses my art to make something. As long as they change something and don't claim that they made the original, I'd take it as a sign that I'm good enough that someone wishes they could draw like me. If they just downloaded the image and re-uploaded it, then I'd be less tolerant.

That said, I've never had my art stolen or used as far as I know, so I can't speak from experience.

 

Theft happens in every branch where there's money to be earned, and art is definitely one of them. It's something you can't stop, it will happen regardless of what you do against it. Now, since I personally don't have any art that would be worth stealing, I don't have any personal experiences with it, but I know it can be really aggrevating to see your art, or anyone else's, get stolen. Especially when the stolen art gets more popular as the original.

 

I have never had any of my art stolen, although I do admit I use other people's art without their permission. However, I don't use it for actual profit (as in money). The thing is people who steal art in terms of making profit from it make me mad though. They take something someone has worked hard on and use it in a way that not only doesn't credit the artist, but take that credit for themselves. It bothers me.

 

Getting my art theft, not really, since I'm bad at art, so I don't do it, but I do have a facebook page for a show, and it happened quite a few times that my posts or theories were stolen by other "smaller" pages about the same thing.

 

I knew someone on another forum who'd had their art stolen off of their deviantART page and turned into Google Chrome themes without their permission. I've never had anyone steal my drawings (to my knowledge), but I'd be really upset if they did.. Whenever I do use someone else's work, mainly just for avatars on forum boards or sidebars on Tumblr, and not for any personal gain, I do always try to give them credit somewhere; i.e. always linking back to the original artist if I know who they are. I'd seen a couple of art thieves on dA last year that were pulling drawings from Pixiv/ZeroChan and taking complete credit for them even after they'd been reported for what they were doing, which really bothered me..

 

A lot of my concept work gotten stolen IRL and when I attends some art shows or basic viewings at the schools around, I would see my concept artwork being used in a painting or drawing, or just plain used for an assignment, which irritates me a lot.

I'll admit, I have took an idea and molded it into my idea, BUT I asked the original artist first before I went ahead with such an idea.

Theft is theft, plagiarism is plagiarism that we see everyday and its nothing that we can honestly do unless we bring it a higher person or the the authority.

 

I've had my art "stolen" and used quite a lot of times. >.< Back during my active Neopets days people used to steal my art and enter it in the pet beauty contests despite how bad my skills were at the time... urgh. Nowadays there are still some pictures I've made that end up being popular and are used often on many websites. There is an Eevee I drew years ago (it's awful since it was so long ago but people love it) that a lot of Pokémon fans use as part of their avatars/signatures. Someone here is actually using it but I haven't told them yet. 8D;

 

I kind of feel sorry for people's artwork and when someone else claims that it's theirs. I usually ask permission of the artist, and credit the person when he deserves it. As for profile pictures and such, I try to use official artworks, rather than artist's artwork. I've never had my sprites stolen, or I don't think so. Yet.
Anyway, they spend their time and dedication to get something stolen? That's just sad.

 

I've actually participated in a few eSports fanart contests where most of the entries were stolen art just to get attention. Long story short, I threw a fit at the artists who just opened up MS Paint and slapped a generic script font that has their username in it.

I've had some of my art stolen a few times before, especially shirt designs for League Of Legends. Sadly, the most I can ever do is contact the site and say something along the lines of "Hey! One of your users is selling my design that I never gave them permission for." or something like that. That usually handles it.

Bottom line though, I think art theft is just as bad as regular theft. It's taking something that isn't yours so you benefit without actually working hard.

 

Fortunately I haven't had any cases of my art being stolen that I know of at least and I'm not one to steal art myself. It makes little sense to do so when it's as easy as asking if you can use it. If you wouldn't steal something from a shop, you should have the common sense not to steal something that has taken someone years of practice to be able to do, not to mention the time spent on actually creating the piece of art.