UPDATE, UPDATE, UPDATE: New news article of RAGE and LOLZ! (Click to read!) To make a long story short: Some tech writer used a copyrighted image to illustrate his article, got confronted by the artist, and responded by being a douche.

-We now return to the regular protest notice.-

The deviantART community is no longer the artist-respecting site that I joined back in 2005. Because of this, it's no longer a decent place to host my portfolio-- or the the portfolios of anyone else who values their rights to their art.

I am tired of people using my work without consent, and of people using others' work without the creators' or owners' consent. (if you don't know why this is a bad thing, check out this journal entry: [link] )

I do not hold the deviantART staff responsible for these failures, because the problem is not with the staff. It's with the people committing these violations. You know why it takes the site staff a ludicrously long time to respond to copyright infringement reports? You know why they tend to mark these reports as "Invalid" instead of taking the time to investigate them? It's not because they're lazy-- it's because they're overwhelmed. There are simply too many offenders and not enough staff to effectively deal with them all.

Back when I first joined this community, copyright (artists' rights) was very tightly policed-- because majority of the community members respected copyright. These days, the site is drowning in a flood of attention-whores and wannabe-"artists" who can't be bothered producing their own original work.

THIS INCLUDES YOU, PEOPLE IN FAN ART CLUBS/GROUPS WHOSE CONTRIBUTIONS CONSIST OF SCRIBBLING OVER A SCREENSHOT OF YOUR FAVORITE VIDEO GAME, MOVIE OR TV SHOW.

It doesn't matter how beautiful the resulting artwork is-- it's UNORIGINAL. It doesn't matter how many hours you spent applying Photoshop filters, tracing or copying the image, or thinking of the perfect witty caption. You've built your work around an image that isn't yours, and that the site doesn't even have legal permission to display (check out [link] to see why it's actually illegal for deviantART to host video game/movie/TV screenshots and other copyrighted works).

No matter how amazing your artwork looks, IT LOOKS LIKE THE WORK OF EVERYONE ELSE WHO USED THAT SAME IMAGE IN THEIR ART. For example: do you have any idea how many people use THE SAME image of Albert Wesker from Umbrella Chronicles, dressed up with Photoshop and turned into desktop wallpapers? Or THE SAME Resident Evil 5 screenshot with some silly caption underneath it? IT'S RIDICULOUS. It was entertaining the first few times or so, but after seeing dozens (perhaps even hundreds) of repetitive renditions, I'm just plain sick of it all.

I refuse to host my art here, because of people who have used it without my consent. And I refuse to browse other people's art, because I'm bored by all the unoriginality. What I will be doing is helping to clean up this place-- that is, continuing to keep an eye out for copyright infringements and reporting them (or notifying the copyright owners). Anyone else who wants to make a stand for artists' rights ought to do the same.