the girl who cried thief

[egypturnash]

I had a more detailed entry on this subject but it got eaten. Growl. So I'll skip the preliminaries and get right to the point:

Is it my imagination, or do loud cries of "art theft", and the copying or swiping actions that lead to these cries, belong exclusively to teenage and early-twenties artists?

I have no theories as to why this may be, just several years of fuzzily-anecdotal evidence that it is so.

Comments

[barberio.livejournal.com]

People who are under XX old still havent finished growing up yet.

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

When I read your music selection, I thought of "The Girls Want To Be With The Girls." I wonder if the Talking Heads recorded enough vaguely gender-themed music to do a sampler...

[tabriscoonz.livejournal.com]

here's the problem with that (though I admit I've condemned teenagers myself) teenage/ early twenties artists make up a HUGE chunk of the art population. Therefore saying that most of the art theft cries are coming from them is kind of redundant when over 50% of the people on forums and VCL are young. Age isn't evenly distributed. I know an older artist in his late twenties who complain about little things like that, but given I only know maybe 3 or 4 artists older than 25, that seems like a lot.
does that make sense?

[synnabar.livejournal.com]

I don't know if it's directly related to my age (30) or what, but I barely have enough free time to draw lately, much less go trolling for art thieves. I have more important things on my mind right now, like paying the bills, keeping my job, feeding the pets, cleaning my apartment, doing the laundry, etc. My fantasy/anthro art is my fun right now, not my profession, so I can afford to be relaxed about it. Plus, I suppose I'm just a bit weary in my "old age".

To be fair, if I was "stolen from" a lot, I might have a different opinion... but then again, I'm really laid-back, so... *shrugs*

The person I've heard it from the most...

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

...is Lance Rund, and he's well out of that age range. Me, I'm just amused that so many folks who scream about having art swiped are in turn snagging ideas from outside sources, like the forty-seventh moron who decided to draw "raver" style. And none of it is at all worth stealing, just adding to my VCL filter...

[ben-raccoon.livejournal.com]

It's probably because the vast majority of the people on the VCL are those teenage and early-twenties people.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

No, dear, I was talking about someone else entirely. Believe it or not, my world doesn't center around you; I am, at present, a bit player in it, at best, just as you are a bit player in mine.

For those wondering what on earth is going on, Madam Venus is annoyed because I put her SNK-hack cards into my large, not-bothering-with-credit collection, and noted this in her original post where she was explicitly saying 'show me yours'.

[tabriscoonz.livejournal.com]

Is it just me, or did that girl just suck all the fun out of the card meme?

Re:

[tabriscoonz.livejournal.com]

How can you compare a stupid card meme and the bandwidth theft of a minute proportion to drugs and narcotics?

I'm so in awe of the over-reaction here.
Over 6 months ago a guy took a lot of different artist's works off the internet and sold them on a CD. You know what the lawyers said when the artists tried to file a suite? Copyrights will only hold is you lose a sum of money of $1500 or over.
Sure, it sucks, the bandwidth you paid for was "stolen." There are blocking codes, I noticed you have one. Look the problem is fixed.

[supersocks.livejournal.com]

It's like TERRORISM!
Everytime you post a link to a ripped-off sprite, Iraqi children explode! No, wait, that's not it... Every time you rip off a video game sprite, add a few pixels and call it your own work, Osama laughs! Nope, not it either.

[ursulav.livejournal.com]

Um...wait, did she do the original art for the SNK things entirely? 'Cos if not, aren't we all ripping off SNK in a admittedly mild and probably-covered-under-parody-laws in the first place? I mean, I like my little Chu card, but it'd be idiocy to try to claim copyright to it--it's an SNK card, mutated and turned green. Or am I missing something?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but you can't see the beginning of it because it's on a locked post in her journal: chasing links on the things, I found an almost-entirely-friends-only journal that consisted of two public posts - a 'This is a friends-only' one, and a 'lookit my SNK cards' one.

The text accompanying the cards included the admonition to show yours off. In fact, the animgif lj icon she made from them also contains such an admonition. So, instead of my usual practice of just snagging the image's url and adding to my collection, I left a reply directing her to my collection.

Bad move. I got a terribly frosty reply to it. Which I could dig out of the mail program's trash and post, but shall refrain from. My reply was, I admit, equally snippy. This seems to have led to her (a) using her webserver's access control to block her two images from showing up in my Collection, (b) closing off the post in question in her journal, and (c) deciding I was talking about her in this post, when I am (I reiterate) definitely not - the particular instance of art-theft cries that spurred this entry was in a now-closed thread on the VCL forum, from someone who is only a little removed from the 'I DREW A PURPLE NUMBAT SO IF YOU DRAW ONE UR RIPPING ME OFFFFF' mentality.

[yakkette.livejournal.com]

I was on her friends list and was deleted because in her journal I (politely, without personal attacks, but frankly) told her she was overreacting. As I've said before, if I removed every person from my friends list who disagreed with me, I'd have no friends. I actually found YOUR journal from hers, ironically enough. And isn't LJ such a small world that I see Chilly here, who I know through IRC and have met, too. Weiiird.

So now I can't view the conversation in her LJ because I'm defriended. Oh, darn.

Anyway, I've posted many times about the hypocrisy of internet fan artists... who make big threats saying "Don't steal my stuff!" and then proceed to violate copyright laws and even sell pictures of copyrighted characters for profit, which is pretty much the biggest "no-no" that exists in copyright-land. When you point this out to them the always get defensive and cranky. Wonder why that is?

Me, I'm not a hardcore bitch about copyright stuff. If someone posts your work claiming it as theirs (which DOES happen actually, more than you'd think) I think that's cause for outrage. But I'm of the opinion that if you post it on the internet it's kind of public domain- people are going to link to it, and if you don't like that, don't post your artwork on the fucking internet. There's no way to control that kind of stuff. And again, the hypocrisy runs rampant. I've seen people who either scanned or modified images from their favorite artist and then warn against displaying those images on their website- idiots, it's not YOUR image! Just becuase you scanned it or modified it doesn't mean jack shit! It still belonged to someone else to begin with, and you're violating THEIR copyright in the meantime.

I think people who bitch about this stuff too much are just looking for something to bitch about. My genuine sympathy goes out to those who have the art directly ripped off by someone (in which they take your art and claim it as their own) but otherwise, if you're a fanartist, you're violating copyright yourself, so shut the fuck up.

*gets off soapbox*

(btw I like your card collection, thanks for adding me!)

[yakkette.livejournal.com]

Drugs are fun.