Deviantart removes artists' rights to their work

http://www.deviantart.com/submit/agree

Clause 5 is supposed to prevent this, but apparently DA has a history of not doing that. I posted in a DA Chat about it, and regular users said it's nothing new and to just watermark everything.

edited 2nd May '14 2:39:39 PM by lalalei2001

Hmm... I haven't read the whole thing, but I presume that you're referring to sections three and four? If so, I think that those amount primarily to Deviant ART being allowed to use the works submitted by artists (such as in advertising Deviant ART, or even simply in displaying them as the site is intended to).

I also note that section two reads (at time of writing, and emphasis mine):

It doesn't look to me as though this removes an artist's rights to their work at all.

Clause 6 clarifies that the rights the website has over your work is just for distribution within the site itself. AKA thumbnails and in site promotions, things like that.

The guy getting his picture stolen by Hot Topic definitely isn't allowed under DA's rules.

I suppose if we're gonna be technical here, most people on dA probably don't really have full claim to their own works anyway, since 98.9% of it is fanart of copyrighted properties.

edited 2nd May '14 8:06:08 PM by Odd1

Tumblr is doing the thing where it gets really excited over something without bothering to examine it more closely.

At least, that's how I found out about this.

You retain rights to a derivative work if you change some aspect of the original work. So let's take a poster of the Avengers assembling as the original work. Someone draws a picture of that with the poses replaced with boobs and butts esher girl poses. In that case, the change is the intent of the poses. Originally the poses were serious, now they're a parody of how female comic book characters are drawn. You cannot claim you own the Avengers, but you do own that picture. So you can sell the picture at conventions (mostly, some cons have specific rules against fanart for certain companies) but your rights are still being impeded if someone takes the picture and puts it on a T-shirt without permission.

Yeah, that's why no matter how badly designed someone's Super Saiyan 4 Sand Village Bankai Shadow the Hedgehog recolor is, it would still be a seriously dick move to violate "donut steel".