CEAUPDATE 070208


UPDATES FROM $realitysquared : Stock Resource Issues

It unfortunately appears that it is once again time to talk about proper stock resources again. We’ve discussed most of these issues in the past and it always helps to remind the community about what constitutes a proper stock resource.

There are a good number of legitimate, legal stock resource sites out there with some being free and some being pay sites. Despite a good number of legitimate stock resource sites the field is also populated by "stock" websites which are little more than large collections of stolen artwork and photographs chopped up and cut out and offered as "free renders” or “free stock”.


We must urge everyone to check the legitimacy of the stock website which you have chosen; check to see if you notice a large number of video game images, celebrity photographs, magazine covers and movie stills populating their “free stock” offerings or if the site features a broad ‘disclaimer’ which ‘disowns’ or ‘credits’ the stock to an unnamed Proper Owner. All of these things are clear indications that you have found a website which specializes in providing copyrighted content without permission and if you use anything from these sites for your deviantART submission you will find that the staff will remove it.


On a closely related note we are continuing to find that large numbers of deviants are using search engines as “stock providers”. Please be aware that an Internet search engine such as Google or Yahoo! and the rest are not providers of free stock imagery. Search engines are designed simply to locate things on the Internet, they are not stock providers and the vast majority of the image results that they return to you are copyright protected and certainly not a free stock resource.


The last, and most recent, problem that we have discovered involves deviants taking stock images from legitimate resource websites and then submitting that stock here as a stock resource, sometimes with some minor manipulation or editing. Now regardless of which legitimate stock site the original resource came from, they all share pretty much a common rule; you cannot redistribute the images you get there. This policy means you cannot pass the stock image around to other people; the original provider requires that everyone obtain it from the same original site where you found it.


The content that you wish to offer as free stock here at deviantART must be entirely your own imagery; if the content you are attempting to offer as stock originally came from another stock website or if it contains things which you got from somewhere or someone else, then you cannot offer it as a stock resource here.


You cannot simply take a free stock photograph from another website and place it here into the deviantART Resource gallery. It does not matter if you have edited or manipulated the original stock in any way, when it comes to the attention of the staff the submission will be removed.


You can of course continue to use stock in your creations and you can continue to recommend and link people to specific examples of stock which you wish to share. What you cannot do is take someone else’s stock and place it into your gallery as a stock offering; please respect the rights and goodwill of all stock providers and allow them to be the only source for their content as intended.