Website farming art images!

[kamikazel33t]

I just wanted to raise awareness to a website stealing our artwork and sketches(it's stealing from many art websites) on this site, I found it while reading a journal from a person on deviantArt who's artwork was also stolen. I am just going to quote right here because she explains it in detail on her journal.

"
YAY. My artwork is being posted on a website without my permission. Yours probably is too. I was notified today by *SquirrelGirl15 and *AJ333 that this website: http://www.dramakoreaterbaru.com is farming links from people's deviantART galleries and posting our artwork up without crediting anyone. Go ahead, run a search for your username. On the upside, I was able to find the whois lookup information on the guy that runs this site. You may send your complaints and angry rants to:

REGISTRANT CONTACT INFO: http://www.deviantart.com/users/outg...reaterbaru.com
----------------------------------
Name: PT.Belawan Sendiri
Phone: +62.616940770
Email Address: [email protected]

I already have :3 You can also complain to his hosting company:

Softlayer Technologies Inc.
http://www.softlayer.com/contact

Let's get this guy shut down -__-


Sample FORMAL DMCA Notice to Service Provider
To Whom It May Concern,

I am writing to you to avail myself of my rights under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This letter is a Notice of Infringement as authorized in § 512(c) of the U.S. Copyright Law. I wish to report an instance of what I feel in good faith is an instance or Copyright Infringement. The infringing material appears on the Service for which you are the designated agent.

You are registered with the U.S. Copyright Office as the Designated Service Provider Agent to receive notifications of alleged Copyright infringement with respect to users of the Service for which you are the Designated Agent.

1. The material
<-a sample Formal DMCA Notice to Service Providers you may use. Thanks to `The-Lantiis .

What this is, and why it's a problem...

From what I understand, it seems this guy is using some sort of "bot" or script to search out artwork on DeviantART. From there, the script automatically generates pages with our artwork on it, and a snippet of the original title. The artwork is still hosted here on DeviantART (putting a greater load on deviantart's servers... FU hotlinking). Now you may say "at least my username is attatched to the artwork" and, true, sometimes it is. The problem is, if you have a long username or your image titles are long, your username will be clipped off the artwork title and not posted. The website does NOT link to our deviantart profiles or deviation pages. It does not display our contact info. It doesn't even display our whole usernames some of the time. So here's the question for you.... how is a random internet user who doesn't know who we are contact us or find more of our artwork if all they see is a tourniquet-ed username on this random korean portal? The answer? They don't - and therein lies the problem. Along with a brief (c) Copyright blah blah blah statement at the bottom of the page that says NOTHING about our copyrights, it is clear to any artist worth a grain of salt, that we are not being given due credit here. Users can also leave comments on our artwork directly on this website... but we won't see it here on DeviantART. So not okay.

Update 1

Note: It's been pointed out to me now that this site also has been crawling places other than DeviantART, including but not limited to: IMVU, The Endless Forest, Nabyn, Tumblr, Youtube, Photobucket, The Lion King Fan Art Archive etc. So if you go by other usernames, check those too!
"
so there you go, now we just need to try and have it taken down!

[Star Eater]

Whats the actual threat to the artists?

[kamikazel33t]

I mean it is just being done without permission and at times names are not linked to the artwork. There is also the issue of copyright as the quote makes out which is that the copyright on the page does not suggest anything about the artists copyright as well as issues of there being no credit given to the artists. It is not a direct threat in where artwork is being sold without permission it is mostly due to the distribution of the artists' artworks with out permission of the artists themselves.

[Artimatum]

Calm down.

[Pigeonkill]

Here is related article. I only skimmed OP's post.


http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...-back-the-net/

[Birkeley]

Maybe the post was a little hysterical, but this kind of behaviour - exploiting other people's work to drive traffic to a website without asking their permission - is not OK and the complaints are valid. There are people who think they can use anything they find on the internet any way they like, but they need to be informed that in order to display an artist's work, they should either first ask the artist nicely and respect their answer (if they're an amateur) or be prepared to pay the artist for the privilege (if they're a professional or of professional standard). Either way the work should be clearly credited, and accepting behaviour to the contrary both devalues art and violates the rights of artists.

[Grosby]

Ha! It's just a robot site. No one's actually going through and handpicking art to post there and there's no 'guy' behind it, it's just one of those robot gobbledygook sites that just automatically fills itself with keywords and other garbage so they come up in web searches and get a click or two. The benefit of that? I don't know exactly - ad money I suppose. Firefox told me it blocked 36 pop-ups. But there's definitely not a living person sitting at computer and handpicking these pictures. Pictures come up when you search 'SquirrelGirl15,' sure, but pictures also come up when you search 'Tom Hanks' or 'wild monkey' or literally anything. It's not confined to art and it's not someone saying 'these are the choicest pictures, this will bring an audience,' it's just 100% random nonsense and there are literally thousands of sites like this out there that are exactly the same.

[Star Eater]

If you have an online portfolio, DA gallery, or whatever, this is what happens.

I'm not saying its right by any means, I don't approve it/condone it and don't ever say that I do.
Its not so much a question of acceptance as it is the reality of the world wide web.

[kamikazel33t]

Well actually most of the writing was not done by me but was in fact a quote from one of the people I was watching on deviantArt. I understand the kind of stuff that happens on the net but I just thought of sharing this for the people who are totally not okay with this. While it is expected that if you post something online it could end up on some no name website somewhere somehow but just as Birkeley stated we should not stop enforcing our right as artists on the net because of these expectations. It's like allowing a child to do whatever he/she wants because it is expected that he/she might be impulsive and does a lot of things without thinking.