Pink Poogle Toy Forum

Scenario:
You're a dedicated Side7.com artist.

You log out one day to work on some artwork. This takes you around 4 hours to complete. You go to log back in and discover you've been banned with no warning. There is no way to contact the admins either because you're not allowed to contest this banning.

You discover from friends a couple of days later that a 13 year old girl and a 14 year old guy have stolen your gallery, in its entirety, and are claiming that you are the thief. They claim your signature is a "joint" account between them. Your friends contest the banning but are turned away.

You can't get your art back. You're rejected from other websites because of this ban rule from Side7.com; only one person takes you on because they don't believe the ban was a fair one.

Forward 8 months later.

You recieve a lengthy email from the Admins at Side7 - in it they apologise profusely for the unjust banning you were put on. The two kids who stole your gallery are banned forever, your art is returned to you. Then they mention that a female artist saw your work, knew your signature from elsewhere and wrote a lengthy letter, hand-written, to them explaining what has happened in detail. They do not name the person who cleared your name, all you know is that she is a girl your age and an artist as well...


I've never known who it was who cleared my name at Side7. I've been grateful to her, wherever she is, ever since that unfortunate occasion of art theft.

I guess what I'm ranting about here, calmly I might add, is how little parents focus on teaching their children that art theft is stealing, no matter what they as kids think, it does hurt, it makes the person who created the original artwork angry and they never learn what it means to do that to someone.

There is a particular instance of this at DeviantART, where my Fiance and I browse and comment (I don't upload and neither does he).

She is 13 years old and has been caught stealing and altering artworks (erasing their signatures and replacing it with her own). She has been told, several times, that this is art theft. She ignored the warnings and had the entirety of her gallery removed as policy violations. Now I log in to browse and comment on the artworks uploaded during the night, and I discover that she is indeed at it again, uploading every artwork that was removed again.

The art she is stealing is also being uploaded to her own "personal" Tripod site, altered in such a way that the artists's original sigs are gone and replaced with hers - not to forget she is also rubbing salt into the wound by using an altered signature, but the identical paw print stamp of the original artist.


When I was starting out as an artist online, I was made aware of crediting the original artist and actually drawing the picture by my own hand. If I used references, from anywhere, I was told the respectful thing to do was ask the artist beforehand (via email) and to make sure I left a detailed reference note of where I got the original picture/pose from.

I'm not saying parents are lazy, though some may fall under the category at some point, but it would help if they sat their kid down and explained that stealing is wrong, and when it comes down to copyrighted artworks, it's not to be done. At all.

What peeves me is she's been told many times that it's stealing. She's been reported as a thief around 6 times by different folks on DA. Yet she continues to do it and doesn't get why so many folks are angry at her for stealing and altering these original arts.

I did originally put it down to this kid not realising it was wrong, but watching her re-upload these arts, with same description and everything, it makes me wonder if this generation is actually being raised right?

Hmm. What do others think? Am I just being concerned over nothing, or is this something others have gone through before?

I agree with you on this issue. Although I have never had problems with this, it is extremely troubling that there is no real recourse for such action much of the time. In the real world, this girl could be dragged into court and possibly face jail time for theft and/or plagerism. On the internet, no one really knows who she is or where she is. Chances are her parents don't even know what deviantart is, let alone that their daughter is breaking the law on this site. And as I've witnessed on Neopets, simply banning them, won't do much good on a site like Deviantart because they will simply make another name and continue under that name. It really frustrates me and troubles me. I'm hoping that in the future, countries will crack down on internet plagerism and fix the problem.

AAAARRRG! It makes me so angry that people think that they have some kind of right to take people's works and claim that they are their own. What is wrong with this girl? I wish I could post here what 2 the ranting gryphon says about artist stealers but his language is a bit...over the head of a family friendly site. I mean artists go out of their way to give a little joy and entertainment and perhaps get some admiration for their work and a few people claim the art as their own as if art just falls out of the sky and into the artists lap periodically.

I doubt the girl's parents know what's going on since I can't imagine them condoning such behavior (although there are some sick people with the morals of something unmentionable out there as parents), but somehow I get this image of spoiled bratty child who probably had a flawed character in the first place. It's probably wrong of me to make assumptions, but hey, they're already stealing aren't they? There's just this mindset I often see on neopets that "If you can get away with it, do it. Rules are just guidelines and nobody pays attention to them anyway and the people who do are just goody-two-shoes." Its just sickening the rudeness and disrespect people think they can get away with just because they're on the internet.

Give me five minutes in a dark alley with them... and i'm pretty sure they won't be able to steal art anymore.
They won't be able to use a knife and a fork either since i'll have ripped off their hands... but I feel it's fair treatment.

Pffft. Cheap shots. Take one on in a well lit alley and I'll be impressed and scared!

I do to them, what they do to me.
They still wouldn't last in a wide open space, and them armed with a baseball bat if they've stolen my art.

Actually, I think she can be charged with copyright infringement. I do believe that art, whether it be written, visual, etc., is automatically copyrighted to you unless you put it in public domain.

Funny, that's my attitude towards life in general.

I don't steal art, though. That's not cool at all. My sympathies. (At the moment I can't give you much more than that, as I've never been artistic enough to have to deal with art thieves.) Hope you get it worked out.

http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html

Very good site.

I suggest everyone reads it.

Mari, I haven't had this experience with artwork, but just this past weekend I got a good taste of what you were talking about. Let me preface: I live in a very wealthy suburb of Chicago. Most of the houses here cost almost more than my steelworker dad made in his entire lifetime. Many of the kids who live here are spoiled beyond imagination. You ask, why do you live there, then? Only because it has the best school system in the state. And, my kid isn't the average, ordinary kid. She needs a school that can deal with her talents and intellect. So, we scrimped and saved to move to a dinky little house on the "wrong side of the tracks" in this wealthy town. We aren't dripping with money, but we do OK.

Back to my story. My pre-teen daughter and her friend went to the park. The friend set her jacket down next to the countless other jackets and my daughter put her eyeglasses ($300 +) and her brand-new mini IPOD inside it. Other kids are playing around there and everyone puts their jacket and "stuff" on the ground. Remember, this is a town where some people don't even lock their doors at night. No strangers around the park, just other kids--kids just like my daughter.

My daughter and her friend played--and never strayed too far from where the jacket was set down. But, upon returning to that area, they saw two older kids close to where the jacket had been set down. Getting closer, they saw that the jacket was gone. They asked the two kids--wealthy, white kids who live in a wealthy town--if they saw the jacket. My daughter explained that her eyeglasses were in the jacket and starts getting visibly upset about their loss. The kids hesitated and looked guilty as sin, according to my daughter, and then ran away to a house across the street--a house that we later discovered had been abandoned for several months.

Needless to say, the eyeglasses, IPOD, and jacket were never found. My guess is that those two kids stole the stuff inside the jacket and then ran to the abandoned house to hide. The eyeglasses and IPOD were set inside the jacket in a way that they would have fallen to the ground if anyone had picked up the jacket--so this wasn't a case of someone mistakenly thinking it was their jacket. My daughter knew all of the other kids who had been at the park at the time--none of them had been around the jacket and she is positive that none of them would have done this. But, she didn't know these other two kids. And, according to her, these two kids looked like they came from wealthy families--nice designer clothes, etc. So, they probably had the money to buy whatever they stole. Maybe they did it for kicks--or to see if they could get away with it. Maybe to sell the stuff for money to buy other things?

Sure, my daughter shouldn't have left anything of value laying on the ground. But, kids here do it all of the time. No one thinks that the "white bread" kid in the designer jacket and Air Jordans swinging on the swings next to them will steal their stuff. She has learned, the hard way, about being scammed in real life.

What gets my hair to stand on end is the fact that my daughter was crying to these kids about her eyeglasses. I mean, really, what good are those eyeglasses to anyone? Stealing the nice jacket and the IPOD is one thing, but a kid's glasses? That takes a lot of nerve. And, proves to me that these kids were not properly raised.

In this wealthy little suburb of mine, lots of the kids are raised by nannies because the moms HAVE to work--not for the money, mind you. But, because they feel the need to do so--because they were professionals before the babies came, so they have to go on being professionals after the babies arrived. No offense to the nannies, but they are paid to do a job--not to instill morals and values into the kids they are watching. And lots of these kids go home after school to empty houses and fend for themselves until mom or dad gets home from work. No one to watch over their actions or to tell them their actions are totally unacceptable. Many of these parents are too busy working 60 hour work weeks, playing tennis at the Country Club, or power-shopping to know just exactly what their kids are getting into.

Last year, one of these kids--from a very well-to-do family--came to school with home-made explosives. Seems he gets bored being left alone in the house and figured out a way to occupy his free time.

So, Mari, I know where you are coming from. I would like to throttle a few people. But, where the heck do you start?

EDIT: And, ahoteinrun, I have just three words for you: "You go, girl." I do believe there'd be many an art thief running around without hands or feet if you ever got close to them.

First thing I have to say is WOW I love your set (Red dwarf is the bomb!)

Second thing is I hate it when people do this I've only ever tried to draw stuff once. I put it on my pet's neopage as part of his story. There were two pictures and One of them ended up in the beauty contest.
I was so annoyed I Neomailed then I neomailed TNT I neomailed Adam and Donna's own acounts telling them but nothing was done about it. Ever since I will never do it again...

This is why I don't post my best songs, poems, etc. online. You all just get the crappy rejects I don't ever want to use again (:P). Stolen work just frustrates me. If you don't have talent in art, you find another hobby. Not just make people believe you have talent in art.

I'm really sorry you had to go through all of this.

-hug-

I've been through this before...someone stole the layout to my old website and said I stole it from them. I got a bunch of friends to flame the life out of her inbox, and she took it down.

Ahoteinrun, you rock^^

People who not only use artwork without permission but credit the art to themselves are probably the lowliest form of thieves in the world. At least normal thieves steal out of necessity or for personal gain. But what do art thieves get? Nothing! Only a fake reputation, perhaps.

As for raising children, I am pretty appalled by the way this generation of children are raised. Kids are spoiled and pampere to no end and they grow up to be whiny youths with no sense of responsiblity or discipline. Upon reaching adulthood they become scum of the society.

you see, this is why i dont get along with society.
the mob mentality.
take actions via the law, if you have a case you will win.
but threatening to "get" people because they stole somthing you drew is nuts.
thievery is low i shall agree with you there.
but the mentality where anything anyone does that you dont like is punishable by a damn good kicking is lower.
people like that rank about on place ahead of Traitors.