There are people who actually still believe that taking, editing and redistributing images taken from the internet is a perfectly acceptable thing1. Apparently to these people, as long as the edited images are not for commercial purposes then it is okay to redistribute them on their own websites. I made the effort to point out that though the authorities may not be chasing after these people for what they did, it is still (morally) wrong to condone this act of infringement and I even went so far to include Jem‘s article on copyright violation. However, as Jem stated in the article, in the end these people still walk away feeling the same way they did before. One of them actually found a statement in the same article…
“Said artwork usually contains a sloppily edited celebrity photograph, a few dodgy Photoshop™ brushes or textures, with a few illegally downloaded (yet usually expensive) fonts chucked on top for good measure.”
… was an insult to her. The irony is, the said person completely missed the next sentence.
In her own blog she stated under the ‘Rules’ section,
- Do not reproduce these graphics in any form or way.
- Do not pass off these graphics as your own creations.
- Remember to credit shinratsu for the graphics you take from here.
And yet, I see she had no problem whatsoever in reproducing those images according to her wishes and I definitely did not see her crediting the original creators anywhere on her site.
I understand that in some cases we need to make changes to the designs for whatever purposes, so I suggest, find out if the works are labelled under Creative Common licenses that allow you to copy, display or even distribute it (for commercial/non-commercial purposes). Nevertheless, most of these licenses would require a credit back to the original author. If they are not labelled under any license, it is wise to get permissions from the original author if possible (which exactly what I did for my fanlisting), and if it that is not possible, the safest bet is to put a credit/disclaimer somewhere near the image.
But again, this thing has been brought up over and over again that one tends to puke merely at the sight of the title.
1 http://www.blogskins.com/forum/1/292736/1/#293104
