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Apr 14, 2010

Someone Got Bored the Other Day and Stole My Work - UPDATED

I have spies everywhere - remember that and I have Google - http://twitter.com/SporkEnthusiast - her real name is Samantha Allison. Hi bitch!

So today I get a Flickr message from a very nice person who informs me that some douchebag named SPORKENTHUSIAST (got that... good) has decided to claim my bead artwork as their own and post it on Reddit.com. And before anyone starts into the whole copyright debate, I'm not talking about patterns, I'm talking about actually pictures of my friggn' work.

They actually ripped pictures of four of my creations from the net, along with two other images from two other artists. They posted old pictures of my Sonic, Tails, Master Chief and Link & Zelda creations. I've updated most of the pictures in my flickr account now to newer ones, but I still have the old ones to compare to in my Etsy store. You can see for yourselves from the links I posted above that they are the same.

Luckily my bead work is so easy to spot that my Flickr friend noticed they were mine and pointed out his theft. Also they were exposed by one of the other artists they stole from and that ultimately got the thread removed.

The thread is still there for viewing but I can't put in my two cents in the comments, so instead I reported everything they were doing - every comment, every story - everything. Hopefully the people at Reddit.com will ban them for something.

God I hate the internet sometimes - cause it makes it too easy for people to do this.

10 comments:

Mercer Smith-Looper said...

what a total douchebag! That happened to me a few years back with etsy.

Unknown said...

I have people usually just rip off my patterns and my ideas. This is the first time they actually stole my pictures and claimed it was theirs.

ashleyl0413 said...

Hi Faith! I am ashleyl0413. I didn't track you down personally, but I helped the person who did post to every comment and let them know she stole from both of us. I agree she is a douchebag!

Unknown said...

Yeah, I was sorry to hear she stole from you too, Ashley0413 People just have no respect for an artist and their hard work - I always give credit to original artists if I borrow patterns for my bead art and never take credit for other people's work.

A friend of mine mentioned I should start watermarking my work with a logo. You should do the same.

It might not save my older stuff from getting stolen since I have too many pictures featured on other sites to control them now, but it will help with future pictures.

ashleyl0413 said...

Yeah, I was told the same idea. I keep sending her messages asking her to admit she lied but we all know that won't happen. SporkEnthusiast is a lowlife with no creativity of her own so she steals ours for internet karma on reddit. The second her comments started going into the negative she started deleting them. Ugh, it is still bothering me that she even tried to like when I FIRST confronted her.

Paula said...

Hey Im sorry to hear about this. I always wondered if someone was taking my pictures (I usually do perler beads, just little easy things from sprites from google lol). I personally dont think any of my stuff is worth stealing (im no artist) but I do have a blog, do you think I should maybe watermark things??

ashleyl0413 said...

If you are worried about someone stealing them I would. To be honest I never thought someone would steal my image and use it as their own. There are so many more people that do very complex pieces but she took ours. I said it somewhere else, using the same pattern/copying a pattern I made up bothers me much less (as long as credit is given) than someone taking my exact picture and saying they did it.

Unknown said...

I think watermarking is a good idea now. As I discovered after 2 or 3 years of not doing it - your images soon get away from you and people can get them from anywhere without ever knowing where they came from. Case in point, Ashley, you created a PacMan picture frame from one who saw in google images - that was mine.

I don't care cause I know you made it for your own purposes but the tiny PacMan sprites are creations of my own and not from any game. I have people ripping them off all the time and selling them on Etsy. It kills me but with no watermark, people just find them on google and use them without permission or knowing better.

Watermark everything for this reason and more.

ashleyl0413 said...

I have yet to make anything with Pac Man. I am all sorts of confused.

Unknown said...

Crap, Ashley. My bad! I meant to say Paula. I was looking at her site the other day and saw a picture frame.

Never mind - long, bad day yesterday.