It's come to my attention that DeviantArt seems to be incapable of following their own Terms of Service [link] when it comes to copyright infringement.

Drinking-Mercury [link] had one of her submissions taken down due to alleged copyright infringement aparently because she had used a photo of mine (the DJ Rogue one) without my permission.

So, knowing that she had asked and gotten permission, I poked about the DevArt site to find out a) How this happened and b) how to stop it from happening again.

as for a), from the ToS:

*****

5. Reporting Copyright Violations

deviantART respects the intellectual property rights of others and expects users of the Service to do the same. At deviantART's discretion and in appropriate circumstances, deviantART may remove Your Content submitted to the Site, terminate the accounts of users or prevent access to the Site by users who infringe the intellectual property rights of others. If you believe the copyright in your work has been violated through this Service, please contact deviantART's agent for notice of claims of copyright infringement, Daniel Sowers who can be reached through help@deviantart.com. You must provide our agent with the following information, which deviantART may then forward to the alleged infringer:

a. A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

b. Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site.

c. Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate the material.

d. Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an electronic mail address at which the complaining party may be contacted.

e. A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner.

f. A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

*****

Now, I'm not a lawyer, but the above seems to be a fairly in depth, detailed and, above all, legally binding set of hoops to jump through to get things pulled down.

Unfortunately, DeviantArt doesn't seem willing or able to fulfill these requirements before they pull an image.

It's hard to articulate where start on how many levels this is wrong, so I'll start with the first point:

5a - I've not given anyone the right to enforce my copyrights, so a signature authorising this person wasn't supplied.

5b and 5c - I'm assuming DevArt was given a link to my gallery and a link to Drinking-Mercurys submission which would seem to fulfil these ones.

5d - DevArt can contact this person.

5e - Permission was given by me, so this cannot have been an informed decision

5f - The cherry on the cake! Whoever sent the takedown notice is guilty of perjury!


Hopefully someone at DevArt will give me the contact details of whoever sent the request, so I can send them an email telling them to stop

As for b) all the photos on the gallery are now under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License, which means that anyone can use them to make other works from without requiring my explicit written permission for.

Then again with DevArt not adhering to their own ToS, I'm not that hopeful that it will make a difference, but I'm hoping that it might!