Scrapbooking Graphic Thieves

These thieves make me sick to my stomach. They love to blog and talk about how they "create" things, but they don't create anything. They buy (or steal through illegal file sharing) the work of genuinely talented people who take weeks or months to digitally paint beautiful objects, then think they own these products and can use them any way they like. They take someone else's work, repackage it into a zip file and sell this stuff to unwary scrap book graphics consumers.

If you want to have your eyes opened dramatically to the scope of what's going on, check out this treatise by a very talented friend of mine, Jaguarwoman. Basically, people like this miscreant, Seachell, buy her work, then sell it (or worse, give it away) for half price or even less. So no one needs to buy the original, costing the actual artist loss of sales. The scrapbooking "artist" (what a joke!) gets lots of praise for giving away beautiful clipart that she neither made herself nor altered in any way. Not even a hue shift, fercrissake! Yes, it's very easy to be generous when you are giving away someone else's hard work. This has happened over and over again to Jaguarwoman, as well as to Finfond.

I will never understand why it is so difficult to follow Terms of Use. You can take resources like a painted leaf, a metallic rectangle, and a bow with a jewel on it and put them altogether to make a pretty frame. You can sell that frame and put your own copyright on it. What you can't do is take the leaf, rectangle and bow with a jewel, slap your own copyright on it, then redistribute it as is. It's a very simple concept, really. People who don't get it seem to be either disingenous or willfully stupid.

I don't know where the idea came from that one becomes an "artist" by recycling someone else's art. It's crazy and it's depressingly ubiquitous. Anyone who buys from these people who steal and lie about it are supporting digital thuggery. It's something to think about.