Imagine being the author of the font "Soopafresh" and seeing this..

Let's Get Hypothetical - How do we deal with this?

      Imagine that is your art being uploaded onto dozens of submissions by dozens of different members. Imagine how frustrating it must be when you, the original author and owner of the piece, already have the original art submission uploaded onto DeviantArt. You've just lost hundreds if not thousands of views from your original art piece, plus the amount of comments/feedback/and favorites that you aren't seeing because someone else has decided to claim it as their own and add it to their gallery.

You must be thinking, I can just contact an administrator or the help desk right? Surely they must have a way to help me with this problem. You contact them and they reply with a thank you message but inform you that they do not have authorization or the power to deal with these types of problems and that if you want the pieces taken down you'll have to individually use the Report button.

So time has gone by and you've been reporting as many pieces as you can but it appears that every week more and more are showing up, You've used the search feature to find what seemed like all the submissions and you've reported every single one thus far. The response is good, You are getting a lot of notes concerning the incident had been taken care of and that a note was sent to the user who has been submitting your content informing them not to upload the deviation as it is against their policy. This is all very good, it almost seems like the problem has been... Alas, this week there are 3 more submissions of the same item. You decide to view the rest of the category to see if possibly you missed some and how odd, apparently a percentage of those submissions you've been reported have been skipped and no action has been taken and they are simply sitting there.

Also it should be noted that in 90%~ of the reports you make concerning someone else's art (if their art is stolen from another source and uploaded to DA) your report is basically ignored. I read that someone has been trying to report some of my pieces because people were uploading them constantly in the "Fonts" section under resources, No action seemed to have been taken until I personally had to report them. I've reported multiple pieces by other authors as well, I located the original source and original creator of the resource and provided that information. All they had to do is click the link to see that this user and that user are not affiliated therefor that submission doesn't belong in that gallery.

So, Let's Contact These People and Tell them to Stop

      So you're probably thinking "If I were this person I'd probably want to find out why they're uploading my stuff and let them know they aren't supposed to upload my content to their Deviantart account". So we find out and apparently these users have absolutely no idea who you are, they don't understand what you're saying and they don't have a problem expressing their disinterest for the situation.

Apparently (to these people) it's 100% okay to upload anyone's art to your gallery as long as you say "I didn't make this", You don't even have to say who made it. Or additionally it's also okay since they found it on another website so that means they get to takeover the copyright and claim it as their own and add it to their gallery.

If you are a regular member of DeviantArt or someone who cares about their work then this really should concern you.

I personally am a graphic designer who creates lots of free resources, I get a lot of wonderful feedback on Deviantart that helps me become better at my job and at my hobby providing these free downloads. I use DA as a gallery and a collection to not only showcase my work but provide these resources for other DeviantArt users to use and add to their collections so they can create Art from these resources. I am not the only one who does this, there are a huge variety of people who have an interest in providing free resources and fonts for people to download and we all have this same problem.

~Jellyka for example provides lots of free fonts. She's reported people who have stolen her work and have stolen work from other authors. She's got some of the most downloaded fonts on free font websites.

These are submissions made by other members featuring and redistributing her work.

Is this entire article just about fonts?

      It may not be, as a font author it's something that I do have to focus and deal with more than most people who are simply submitting their own traditional art, photos, drawings etc. I've been told there are moderators who clean galleries and focus on sections of DeviantArt to deal with these types of situations, duplicant submissions and such but I feel alone when it comes to cleaning a category I submit to. Other categories on DeviantArt seem to be taking this type of thing more seriously than the resources section. It's almost understandable as resources are often distributed in various forms of media, magazines, free downloads websites, torrents and others but this doesn't mean we should continue to allow it.

I'm sure there are artists of other categories who feel the same way, the customization section is a huge collection of icons and graphics from various sources often using the same copyrighted images. In the vector resources section I've seen art that has requires purchase from vector stock websites like shutterstock, istockphoto, vectorstock. These people are using deviantart to illegally distribute resources, many of us refer to it as "warez".

While that itself is a huge problem has there are also a huge number of deviations in the font section that are from "pay sites" such as Fonts.com, MyFonts etc. You're supposed to pay for these fonts in order to acquire them, and many of these font authors are from hundreds of years ago so who's job is it to report these deviations? If people continuously upload "Arial" and it's friends then DA could experience big problems if action isn't taken from companies and font foundries like ITC, House Industries and licensed distributors like MyFonts.

Why is it okay for other sites to distribute fonts/resources but not DA members?

      If I can make any point in this news article it's this: DeviantArt is a community for original artists. When you are signing up to DeviantArt you are not creating a free-for-all "free downloads" website. Your DeviantArt gallery is a place for you to showcase your own work. Under every art piece and submission you will see a copyright for that user and their work.

On websites out of DA, Rules and terms apply to the universal copyright policy in which a download belongs to whomever created it or whoever owns the copyright for that item. For example: DaFont.com does not privately own or hold any exclusive rights to the fonts on it's website, each font author is the original author and copyright owner and are responsible for their own terms and conditions.

As a side note, it is incorrect to "credit" DaFont as the author of a font if you were to use it on your DeviantArt submission, the original author is provided on all fonts on Dafont and many other font websites and many of those authors have a deviantart page or website. If you want to appropriately give credit then those individual artists are who you should be linking to and naming not "Font from Dafont". That's the equivalent to thanking google for information you found on a professors blog, just because the professors blog showed in your search results doesn't mean Google had anything to do with the release or writing of that information.

The bottom line is, DeviantArt is a social networking showcase platform. You are responsible for your art and you are not supposed to (legally you are not allowed as it is against DA policy) submit other people's work; whether it's a photo taken by someone else or a font that was made by someone else.

By submitting anything on DeviantArt you are basically agreeing to these terms and if those terms are broken your submission will be deleted and your account can be banned.

So how can I provide resources made by other people?

If you would like to offer downloads and free resources that you did not create you can do something similar to =Karmillina. She has a collection and showcases fonts that are available for download, not by uploading the fonts but my publicly displaying a collection of pre-existing original fonts submitted by their real owners on DeviantArt. To do this you would need a premium account which is only $29.95 a year and then you basically display your collection of submissions that you've found on DeviantArt. You are not stealing anyone's work or claiming it as your own in this process.

You could also create a website off of deviantart, Again you'll probably want to make sure to credit the original artists. If you use a blog, wordpress or whatever you'll have full control on what you can offer. Again, the universal copyright policy will affect how and what you are able to redistribute.

In any case it is always in good taste to credit and link the original author of something you want to redistribute but even still it doesn't actually mean you are allowed to redistribute it and if that's the case you should contact those authors before you find that your website has been taken down by your host due to copyright problems just like your account on DeviantArt could be banned for uploading other people's work.

Point Made. Is there a solution?

      If there is a copyright or moderation team that helps clean up DA's submissions There should be someone to help with the resources section. DeviantArt has tons of users, there should be a more responsive team that deals with pieces that violate the submission policy. If I am reporting someone's resources that are on DA that I know were created by someone else and I can provide proof and a link to the original author and their work then why can't that piece get deleted just as if it were my own. Action should be taken when you report work that was stolen from someone else, not just your own.

Notes from the News Anchor.

      Just to make some other points on how difficult it is to actually find your art to report art theft take a look at the font "Carnevalee Freakshow", a popular font that is being constantly resubmitted. The deviantart search results gets 7 results, none of which are the actual font. However if you look below you'll see that there are at least 4 copies floating around, none of which were uploaded by the original author. Notice some aren't even spelled correctly, the original author's name is "Christopher Hansen" and he doesn't even have an active website let alone an active social network account including DeviantArt.


Candice is a commercial font that is only legally available through purchase, However if you do a quick browse on DeviantArt you should have no problem scoping out some submissions that redistributes this font.


One of the users who has submitted the font says: "I you use, got to give me credit" which translates to "You must credit me if you use this font". The other person happily writes "Totalmente grátis! & no hacen falta creditos nada ♥ AMO esta fuente " which sadly translates into "Totally free! & Do not need anything ♥ AMO credits this source ".

We have work to do, and as many reports as we make not all of them have been successful for some reason, We don't have time to sit here all day and report everything.. Why is it our responsibility to clean up DeviantArt? This is a community run website but it has administrators, staff and moderators so how come they aren't openly helping people like me unless I do all the work for them?

I really hope this topic opens some eyes, If you do see a font or vector or photoshop brush that was created by someone else I urge you to report it or at least collect it to a folder called Art Theft to give these users some exposure. Once collected you can report them to a staff member.. But if you're like me they will simply "Thank you for your inquiry" but will do not have the power to do anything about it.

..And that my friends is a problem.

DA needs a more active team to deal with these problems and the users submitting these items really need to stop. I work at home on freelance and I am certainly available to help but why bother helping when nobody can help me resolve this, If I can only successfully report a fraction of my own art theft and none of anyone else's why should I bother?

I love DA but it's getting hard and frustrating to deal with these problems. There are people like me who are willing to donate their time in cleaning up DeviantArt but nobody will let me and they tell me there's nothing they can do about it.

Original Artists Who Deserve the Attention that Art Thieves are taking from them

Any many more people who help the community create new and beautiful art.

We should see more of this: [link] for the people stealing and redistributing our fonts and resources.