Deviously yours

I have a Deviantart account but that’s not because I’m an artist but because I collect artworks, digital drawings mostly chibis or animes and I use my account to arthunt and stalk my favorite cousins who are both awesome graphic designers. One of the artworks I’ve purchased before was “stolen” from me when someone used it to design her webpage she calls herself “Princess” which is the name of my virtual pet and I had the Japanese translation of that name “Hime” stamped on the artwork so she thought it was made for her. There are so many misconceptions about using art posted in DA. Creative Commons license options are integrated into the system and it’s one of the things which I love about DA, just the other day I was able to download this Photoshop starlight brush set for free and use it to create a background for one of my artwork collection see image left. Whenever you post an artwork in DA you can control the settings depending on how much “sharing” you want and the least is “all rights reserved” but even so they only put a watermark on the thumbnail version and you have to manually add your own watermark to guard your artwork. The copyright information is only displayed if you choose the creative commons license option and this really gives the wrong notion that if the art doesn’t have any watermark or copyright information then it is free for usage and copying. Another criticism about the system is that there is no way to review the artwork for copyright infringement upon uploading, so unless you catch someone stealing your art by chance like what happened to me, then the artwork uploaded would not be reported and it will not be taken down. And most of the time the art is stolen to make money out of it like the case of Deb Walker who later on found out that her artworks were being auctioned off in Las Vegas or in eBay. It really is a great platform which encourages creativity, I began to be interested in Photoshop editing after I found those brushes ^^, but it can also be abused and therefore if you don’t really want your works stolen you have to put safeguards like watermarks on your artwork.

*Drawing is a gift from lilrain