Advice on Art Theft...?

[mandyseley.livejournal.com]

Someone on DeviantArt just contacted me to let me know that my art had been "stolen." I've never had this happen before, and it's not quite the normal "posting my work and calling it their own" situation...

The person who contacted me was an artist who was commissioned to draw someone's character. Their customer gave them a reference image, which they thought looked familiar. As it turns out, it's a recolored version of a commission I drew a while back.

The original is here, and the recolor that this person showed me had the cat character painted over with black and purple, and my signature crudely scratched out (the person who contacted me has removed the recolor from their photobucket account now, though their customer is still using a cropped version of it as their avatar on this FA account)

The customer claimed they first found my original drawing here, on some site called e621 - a site I've never heard of...

I'm at a bit of a loss, here. They're not publicly posting the recolor as theirs (other than the FA avatar), but they are distributing it via email and were careful to remove my signature and avoid crediting me (or the character's owner).

So... what should I do, here? Is this enough cause for concern that I should approach this guy about stealing my work? Should I just let it slide because this is the internet and stuff like this is bound to happen?

Looks like I'll be watermarking work from here on, though. Sigh, I hate watermarks.

Update: The avatar was removed by FA admins, and the reposted image was removed from e621 once I asked the admin to take it down.

Comments

[connorgoodwolf.livejournal.com]

I'll forward this to the FA admins.

Also,

e621 is an art pirate site. Even though I had the site shut down over child porn, people currently post art of on the site which doesn't belong to them.

They're typical art pirates, including the mindset.

You can remove your art by emailing varka at varka@e621.net

[fatkraken.livejournal.com]

Other than the sig being scratched out, I don't think it's that big of a deal. If they were making money from the character or claiming they had drawn it it would be another thing entirely, but to use it as basically an outline to sketch out colours to commission an original image is different to me. It;s still a bit off obviously, but not worth getting upset about.

[connorgoodwolf.livejournal.com]

I emailed WarMock earlier and he has defaulted the avatar.

[animecat.livejournal.com]

I hate watermarks too, but since I started using them I have seen NO evidence of my work popping up anywhere but where I post them. I also only post things at a reduced size in a low quality JPG with a max of 72dpi. It helps, it really does.

My advice? Get creative with your watermark. I use my studio logo. You can make it fun instead of boring. It's not quite so bad that way.

[sigilgoat.livejournal.com]

That's why I started using watermarks as well. Commissioners all get an unwatermarked version (which sometimes they post, but I send them a low rez resize which they end up using most of the time)

I've noticed a half in my stuff showing up other places. You'll want it to be in the MIDDLE of the picture, or at least covering up some of it, or people will still work around it.

[thaily.livejournal.com]

Confront them directly if you have a chance, tell him to stop using your work.

Then make a public note on your original submission and contact the new owner of e621 and tell him to take the image down. Hopefully this guy will have more sense and respect for artists than the previous one.

[cesarin.livejournal.com]

as for the icon thing, I think you could ask the dude, I found people as well using my personal icons I bought for their characters, and they kindly acomplied to change theirs.

being nice at first can make wonders, unless the admin or subject at hand is an asshole.
wich of course... requires more effort to make them still acomply.

Try not to blame e621 for this one

[cary everett (from livejournal.com)]

I hope you will take consideration to the fact that e621 both named you as the artist, and linked to your DA gallery.

e621 has always had a policy that it is never acceptable to remove an artist's signature, or to remove watermarks, or otherwise defile an artist's work.

The whole purpose of e621 is to be a search engine, nothing more, and strives to give every artist the recognition for the work that they deserve. A human powered search directory, using keywords people assign to images in order to be more powerful than crawler based search engines which lack precision for images.

Please reconsider the way you think of e621.