DA is Now Pretty Much Cool with Art Theft

So I recently had somebody fave something of mine. As is my usual habit, I went to check out their page, see if they had any deviations I might be interested in, see if they'd faved other things that I might enjoy, that sort of thing. Turns out they did have a lot of deviations I was interested in, which I realized right away because I'd already seen them on other deviants' pages. Because those other deviants are the actual artists, and this deviant is posting them as though they are his own work.

"Simple enough," I thought, "I'll report the deviations. After all, a lot of these deviations still have the original artists' watermarks, plus the artists are mostly on DA, so proving the real artist should be no problem."

That's when I discovered that DA has changed their reporting policy. You are now no longer allowed to report art theft, or other copyright infringement, unless you are the copyright holder on the stolen work, with a heavy implication that your report has to come with a DMCA notice and a legally enforceable obligation on DA to take the piece down. If you're a third party, you're given a lengthy boilerplate linking to DA's journal discussing the concept of copyright. The boilerplate concludes with "DeviantArt protects the rights of artists and maintains the following Copyright Policy. If you believe this deviation is using third party content which you yourself do not own or control, you may still comment under the deviation, if you wish, recommending to the deviant that they consult DeviantArt's journal on art theft."

So: Prevail upon the thief's good conscience to stop stealing, but please don't involve DA.

I understand that DA is in a tough position. I understand that they're on a knife's edge when it comes to balancing the rights of artists to make, for example, fan works against the potential legal implications of hosting copyright infringing works. And I'm certain that their policy is legally defensible. But taking an absolutist "We will enforce copyright law only if you knock on our door with a DMCA takedown and a gaggle of lawyers" is a terrible stance to take if you want to cultivate a community of artists and not art thieves.

Here is why this is important: Artists, particularly the independent, amateur or semi-pro artists that DA pretends to care about, generally don't have the time, energy, resources, know-how, or desire to constantly patrol DA for theft of their works. At the same time, it shouldn't be on DA to constantly police every piece that gets submitted to ensure they're non-infringing; that would massively slow down the submission process and would make the platform unworkable. An adequate compromise, which they supposedly had before, is to deputize the site's users to report theft and examine each report on a case-by-case basis to determine if there's infringement. It would even be fine if they leaned heavily on the side of finding works non-infringing. But in the case of blatant and obvious theft, there's now nothing to be done if you can't get the copyright holder to make a DA account and file a report.

And that's one of the insidious things about this new policy. Artists can't fix the problem by "taking their ball and going home" and removing their stuff from DA's platform, because, as little as DA cares about protecting the rights of their users, they care absolutely nothing about protecting the rights of artists not on the site. If somebody posts your professional art as their deviation, DA couldn't care less until you show up with a court order.

I'm pretty mad about this. I may possibly remove my work from DA over it and, if I do, you can find my stuff on amystories.net. Frankly, it'd be a good excuse to get that site up to date and fully running.