Markiehoe wrote: Five_Red
It really sucks that your work got pirated and that people view it from sites not intended by you.
Was it pirated by a torrent site?
Erm, no. Not everything is the fault of torrents.
I just thought it was funny (in a kind-of sad world weary way) that Supergirl Radio had tweeted it under the hashtag #FanArtFriday -- it should have been #ArtPlagiarizedFromGenuineFansFriday.
Supergirl Radio I'm sure posted it in good faith -- how were they to know it was a cheap rip off of a genuine fan's work? So I don't blame them. (I did tweet them a thank you and a link to the original several hours ago -- so far nothing! Maybe they're offline?)
[EDIT: Seems they were offline after all. They've eventually tweeted out my original -- so applause and a big thumbs up to Supergirl Radio; as I tweeted in reply: they're one of the good guys. They're supporting fan art, and well done them!]
In this case of this pic (as best I can tell) someone on Tumblr just took the image from my DA, removed the small tag in the corner that identifies it as my work, added "Coming this Fall" to the bottom and posted it as their own. Because this person has quite a few followers on Tumblr the pic has been steadily circulating around that site, and has escaped onto other sites credited back to the guy on Tumblr. I've even found it (thanks to Google Image Search) being used on an Asian news site to illustrate a story about the Supergirl series. What pissed me off is that his version uses really $&%#ty compression that makes the image look absolutely awful and blocky, and has been scaled to a fraction of its original HD size.
I mean I'm pretty easy going when it comes to people re-purposing my stuff. I've seen people take my images and photoshop Emma Watson's head onto them(!!) Al (aka 'Albais' here) even sent me an example a few days ago of someone who photoshop'd his girlfriend's head onto one of my Supergirl pics. No big deal -- at least these guys are making a new piece of work... something new and 'transformative' from existing material (like myself!) In fact, I often find these modifications quite amusing -- these people are putting some effort in to turn my pic into something new. But I draw the line at people who think simply cropping or just adding a line or two of text is 'transformative' enough to consider it their own work.
I give my stuff away free, and I don't plaster watermarks all over it -- the tag is deliberately small and translucent so it will only be noticed if you look for it. But even though the tag is as unobtrusive, it doesn't stop people from stripping it. This guy is not the only offender -- there's at least one other culprit, again on Tumblr, who anonymises my work before he posts it. And because it is very easy to amass a huge number of followers on sites like Pinterest and Tumblr by simply creating a constant stream of posts from other people's work, all of the favs and reposts go to these copy/paste merchants, rather than the Twitter/Tumblr/Pinterest/Facebook/whatever accounts of the original artists.
So... why is that a problem?
Well, even if they don't anonymize or alter with the image content, the copy/paste merchants rarely upload high quality versions of the image (or links to the HD versions); so as an artist you have the ultimate insult of having slaved many hours over an image and made it available for free, only to have 500 people 'like' a low resolution, horribly re-compressed, low-grade copy posted by someone else (!!)
Attachment supergirl_radio_knockoff.jpg not found
(Hey, here's an idea c/p merchants if you're reading:
why not use the comment box on Tumblr or Pinterest to put a link back to the place you downloaded the original full sized version,?! So other fans can get it too!!)
There's a lot of really great people in this community who give encouragement and support. All it takes is a few idiots, though, to leave a sour taste in the mouth.
Sorry for the OT rant.
R5