Okay ladies and gentlemen. Here goes keia on a trek to discuss art theft, what it is, what it isn't, the way society views it, and deviantART's policies on it.

What is Art Theft?
For the most part, the view on art theft is that if a person looks at your image and has taken either design or postural influences from your art they are stealing from you. This includes tracing, copying concepts, copying character designs, copying color schemes, copying poses, and other things. When a person sees that this has happened, they (and others) usually become very angry or hurt.

But what is art theft really? The bottom line is, it's artwork directly taken. Copied and pasted. While deviantART agrees that tracing isn't really an original practice, it is a completely natural part of human nature. It is also artistically stimulating and can help an artist break down the basic steps used by a more experienced artist to improve their own methods. To be on the safe side, deviantART will also delete an image if it looks so ridiculously identical to another image that there is no clear way to tell if it contains any copied and pasted material or not. Concerning literature, an identical poem or prose with minor alterations is also a policy violation, this is just as serious as the theft of an image. As you may or may not know, people get kicked out of college for plagiarizing. Regarding sprites/pixel art of all kinds, imagine someone takes a very small sprite and copies down every pixel in a new document manually. One could argue that even though it is an exact replica it is an original work. This is unacceptable because it is no different from opening a poetry book and typing out a poem word for word and uploading it. Whether you copied and pasted it or copied it exactly it's still the same and this is why we will still delete an image that looks ridiculously identical to something else but not simple traces.

Keia's take
My take has changed over the years. I have an infamous history of people trace and copy the hell out of all my art and designs. This used to piss me off a LOT. It is a tender topic. You feel like someone has taken something you worked hard on and is taking credit for your work. Personally knowing many people, anyone who copied my art usually got thoroughly mobbed. So what's my current take on it? I have come to terms with the deviantART view and see exactly why they chose to look at it this way, and would like to take a moment to publicly appologize to those deviants who suffered the wrath of myself and others over innocent hefty inspiration.

Take an example. Imagine there's a brand new artist who had just found deviantART and is all wow this is an awesome site! They see all these amazing artists and want to make amazing art too. They look at a piece that particularly touches them and draw something extremely similar to it. NOT realizing that this is considered an offensive and insulting act as they have not belonged to an art community before, they find that this has caused several very angry, very intimidating people to come to their page and tell this brand new artist that they're a horrible thief who should burn in hell. This artist, who had the potential to become the best artist on the entire site, has been driven off over something that they just didn't understand.

This happened to me, except I did not leave thanks to some kind words from *sonicelectronic who made me believe, even though she was not aware of the situation at the time, that I had potential and was not unwelcomed by everyone due to my misdeeds. I admit it, when I saw =bara-chan's and *zetallis's art, I basically took and copied images that they did and only changed what I was capable of doing on my own at the time, did I know that wasn't okay? No I didn't. I was 16 which is considerably old and I DID NOT realize that it was wrong. People attacked me over it. I honestly almost left. I would probably have forgotten about art, would have never created Kona, and would never have become a GD, never would have made all the brilliant friends I've made here, never would have had this enlightening artistic experience.

I am ashamed and highly disappointed in myself that it took me this long, even after I EXPERIENCED it, to fully realize the subject. I may be responsible for the departure of artists that would have become amazing contributors to our community, and that's sad.

Of course this doesn't mean I LIKE it when people copy me or trace my art. It just doesn't bother me so much, I am not offended by it. But in extreme cases I still see myself encouraging originality and credits. If someone draws Kona and then says that it's 100% their original design and deny that they had any influence from me, that's bad I think. Although not against the policies (save any needless insulting) I see myself being irked by something like that, not so much that it would be copying me but that it would be flat out lying and rather insulting that they would believe I was stupid enough to believe it. Very fortunately nothing that extreme has ever happened.

I think all of this is important to consider. Next time you see someone and you feel like they're ripping someone else off, pretend it was the innocently ignorant 16 year old me, and be gentle and informative if you decide to approach them with your concern. Who knows what sorts of potential they might posess? I believe our community would be much warmer and welcoming if we all thought about and approached it this way.

It's like burping at the table. Not everyone knows that it's rude, you won't get sent away from the table for it but it's still nice not to do it. And it's better to say "Baby you probably shouldn't do that you might offend someone" with a smile, than "you suck you dirty burper everyone knows burping is wrong you don't belong here". I think this is a good example because burping at the table isn't rude everywhere and in some places is even considered a compliment. And this makes me remember all the times I shot down people who said "You should be flattered" to me.

I'm sorry I didn't start sooner.