Click Me (http://starfantazy.deviantart.com/journal/13664898/)

Read the link. It's kind of retarded. :mad:

By uploading your pictures to the internet, it is possible for anyone anywhere to download them and pass them off as their own.

Simple as that.

It's illegal, but you really don't need a legal representative to do this for you.
I'm guessing you can e-mail photobucket and get them to take the stuff off.

And for gods sake don't put a giant, ugly watermark on your picture to discourage stealing.
"I know! I'll make my art really bad to look at! Then NOONE will steal it!"

I'm kinda ticked that someone stole my username for a picture of a duck, though. :p
http://s210.photobucket.com/albums/bb284/pigbuster/

Nice. A picture of a duck.
It just kinda ****es me off that people would actually do that though. Even though I knew that before, but it's just... retarded.

Does this remind anyone else of STBrookes? I seem to remember he did something similar to Philby's art once. He didn't sell them at least, but he passed them off as his own.

What's the point of stealing art? Is it to trick people that you are good at drawing in order to feel better about yourself? That would just get me more depressed and increase my feeling of being a failure... No, thoose people need to find what their good at and try impress people with that..

*Uploads sum Bethoven to my website and tags it with my name... I are great musican*

Granted, they could also just be using those accounts to get around dA's hotlinking protection.

Wait... Do you mean that person got their art nicked, or that person is pretending they got their art nicked?

Who are you asking? Well, I don't think anybody pretends to get their art stolen, that'd just be wierd.. Especially if they stole their own art in order to establish a fake fanbase :D

Besides stealing classic paintings and selling them underground for major profit, I think most stolen art get's put on ads, (billboard stuff) or because someone wants to have a cool picture on their website. Like this one artist who had his pictures put on club/rave flyers without his knowing. People who claim to be the creator is probably the least common reason for art theft. Just some thoughts..

What's the point of stealing art? Is it to trick people that you are good at drawing in order to feel better about yourself? That would just get me more depressed and increase my feeling of being a failure... No, thoose people need to find what their good at and try impress people with that..

*Uploads sum Bethoven to my website and tags it with my name... I are great musican*

...They sell it and make money with it?

There are so many traced pictures that get praised on Deviantart it's not even funny. Most of them are traced anime screenshots, since anime fans tend to be too retarded to notice and just favorite anything.

Rabble traces/eyeballs stuff the time.

I am much more annoyed by the people who applaud traced art than the people who uppload it.. I think.

Ok, I've looked further into this and, no Photobucket user makes profit off of this. All Photobucket albums have the feature to buy prints of their contents. If the album is made public, then anyone can do so. However, all the costs of printing album contents go to the manufacturer, Qoop, and in no way relate to the owner of the album. Photobucket is not a store. Qoop just prints online content. This is just a feature for whoever wants to print stuff easily and don't have quality equipment for it. The album owner, just like anybody else, has to pay for whatever he has printed, whether his own or not. Just as it's his responsiblity what he puts in his album, if he makes it public and what is printed off of it. You can't disable this feature. So whether the owners of these albums are actually ripping off artists or not, remains unknown. They might still be paying credit to the artists for wherever they use them, link them or print them. Who knows. Just don't go jumping to conclusions.

This, in the end, is not much different than anyone can, if they want, save some image they find online and print it or share it or spread it, whether they claim it as their own or not. It has nothing to do with Photobucket, Qoop or anything. There is no profit involved aside from manufacturing costs. In fact, images saved right off of Deviantart probably wouldn't even have the proper resolution for quality printing. And, as usual, if artists are so worried, watermark your stuff. It's that simple.

watermark your stuff. It's that simple.

But for christsakes do it right.

I've seen many images that were ruined by ugly watermarks.

I think you are overreacting... I never see bad watermarks. Though this one time I saw one that was 1/5 of the image, but then again the picture it was on wasn't very good in the first place so they cancelled each other out.

If you're going for visible watermarking, the trick is to place it on a non-intrusive but detailed spot of the image. Or you can always go for invisible watermarking, though I never looked into that much.

Ok, I've looked further into this and, no Photobucket user makes profit off of this.
That's a relief at least.