Stolen Art / Art Thefts

Art thefts, be they here on dA, on Ebay, Facebook, have small online shops and whatnot are an annoying problem since many years.


So what should you do to prevent that someone else uses your work, your talent and time without your consent  to gain money, fame, "faves" or whatever else by copying it and showing it without crediting you at least properly?


1. Stay calm, don't overreact. Look what kind of people or individuals used your art and for what reasons. Try to think strategically instead of writing an angry comment on someone's profile  or facebook page in caps. That leads usually to nothing.


2. Look up if you can contact any copyright, anti-piracy teams by the website where something copied/stlen was shown/offered. I saw a case today as example where someome tried to sell t-shirts and mugs of a fan art of Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy ..without crediting the artist and by erasing the watermark and signature of the artist.
The person tried to sell it via a small facebook group which had around 25 followers.

In that case as example you can contact facebook AND Disney about it. To prevent that someone tries to make money with your fan art, it makes often the most sense to contact the legal copyright holders since they have usually an even bigger interest than yourself that their intellectual properties are not used to make money without their consent and knowledge.

In the example it also makes sense to lookup where exactly a t-shirt or mug is sold since this is often done via big t-shirt print shops. It makes sense to contact them as well and report the "company" who tried to make money with fan art. Shops have to take care that everything they sell is legal.

Facebook and Ebay are also very fast if you report any copyright issues there and take down the specific pages, profiles, shops and auctions. I don't know how it is with Amazon but guess it is similar.


3. You can never be absolutely sure that someone will use your art except you are only sharing really tiny images that have watermarks that are bigger than anything else on the image.

But ask yourself if that is neccessary. While we can read about art thefts every week those affect maybe 1%? of all fan arts submitted to deviantART on a day as example. It is a totally annoying and super disrespectful thing no matter if it is a 15 year old dude who thinks its cool to copy fan arts by guys like artgerm, genzoman and other popular artists and write they are his works or a semi-professional dude or team that tries to make some bucks with fan art through ebay etc.

However, often it is relative easy to bring down those pirates and often you can get help by others here on deviantart that will translate foreign languages for you and point you to adresses you can contact

It might be a weird way of thinking but personally I see artthefts as a challenge and have almost fun to get their stuff down. While I am not an artist like you and don't draw art and just write, organize and do a bit webdesign I faced websites that copied complete articles from my site, that copied images from our art collaborations including the game-art-hq watermark on them and in a really bad case, there was a quite big Zelda website that copied all of the Link's Blacklist artworks back in 2012, made an article and a gallery with them without crediting anyone of the artists or our website.
It took a couple of emails and they removed all but 3 of the artworks and credited all three artists + changed the articles text and linked to the Link's Blacklist main gallery.

The background was that some of their editors are / were just teenagers who just liked the artworks but probably thought that images and art projects are growing on trees like apples. We here know and respect copyrights usually but how often did you hear people saying "I found this on google"
Its a sad fact that too many people out there don't even know about copyrights and just download or share what they find in the google image search without looking up who made it or from which website it was.

Personally I would blame deviantart itself for not reacting to google images search changes in january 2013. You can see all images that are on deviantart  in the google image search without any form of protection while there are solutions out there and a couple of groups including photographers are in legal battles with google because of their image search ..but it will probably take more years until something is decided.

Your images on game-art-hq.com are actually...semi-protected. If someone wants to see the image in full-size directly on google, he is instead getting redirected to game-art-hq.com.

As soon as my site is completely independent from ads I might add a watermark that appears on the google image search. This would mean less visitors but it also means that all images there are not seen without its proper context like who created them, or if they are a part of a community project like our Pokemon or Legend of Zelda Tributes.

This is something that would help to prevent a lot of sharingwithoutcaring cases already if deviantart and other big image hosters/art sites would do it and it would weaken google position and made more people smarter about art, images and from where they are.


Beside that, I recommend a watermark that includes your name and maybe your dA or another url. Something like seen in this example. While art thefts might be annoying, you see no giant dA watermarks or other big watermarks on the works of the more popular artists here usually. Something small and decently should be enough. Giant watermarks are rather counter-productive.


If you ever have your art copied or stolen, please try to act rational. You are also welcome to contact me and If it is possible I will try to help you with the case. Am not a lawyer or anything but I learned this and that through the years.



Greets and a happy Tuesday everyone.