For those of you have a deviantART account, you're probably aware about art theft around dA. Well, not too long ago, I looking for some art thieves to report and then I stumbled across this group. This group happened to be an art thief support group I had to alert the members of Bomberman-Lovers about this group and even wrote a journal about it. Anyways, this is just a little warning for those of you on here who do have an account. From what I know, the founder of the group is a thief who was constantly banned but they kept on creating new accounts. Seriously, some people...  

Here is the link to the group Join-Zoomkun
 

Also I would like to apologize if I put this in the wrong section.  

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She's a maniac~

This is what happens when you feed the trolls, as long as people are willing to give them attention then they'll keep coming back for more. Sticking something on the internet pretty much means that it's for grabs, people shouldn't be surprised when it gets taken. If you don't want it to be stolen then you could always just put a big transparent watermark on the image, which would be too much trouble for the trolls to remove from every image.

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"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they're not entitled to their own facts."

Unfortunately, it's pretty much as Razon said. Times like these I'm almost glad that I don't have a scanner or any means of putting up my stuff online.

It's pretty silly and perhaps a bit discouraging that there is an actual group on dA that supports art theft, but what can anyone do about it, really? All you can really do about it is to, simply, stop feeding the trolls. But not everyone on the Internet has the good sense to do that now, do they? Taking a good look at certain YouTube video comments, and even the comments in that group you're talking about, pretty much proves that.

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The Local Video Gaming Lunatic

Recent stuff I'm into:

Watching: A Certain Scientific Railgun (ep.14, stalled), Hoshi no Kirby (ep. 71, stalled), Nazo No Kanojo X (ep. 8), Acchi Kocchi (ep. 8)
Reading: nothing

To me, it's not nearly as sad that artwork is being stolen, as it is that there are so many people out there who have such a self-destructive desire for attention. What a pitiful waste of life.

I guess I'd have to agree with everyone else on the Lao-Tzu-esque "leave 'em alone" strategy. Though when it comes to things like theftt, I don't know. Maybe just nuke the world. That's probably the only way to stop them.

Although I've got to say that an art-thief support group on deviantArt is just about the stupidest type of trolling that I've ever heard of. Wouldn't the dA admins just ban anyone who joined? And what happened to ip bans and whatnot?

All 3 of you have a point on not feeding the trolls. I even posted a comment on the group's page saying,"Don't feed the troll people." All we have to do is to wait for the admins to ban the group with the ban hammer.

As for what Razon said, sometimes not even a transparent watermark works. I've seen this one artwork that had a watermark on and someone stole it and removed the watermark. I heard that the founder had like 6 ban evasions.

I mean, take a look at this artwork that I did (and yes, Regulus IS giving this girl a rose). I put a watermark on it, knowing that it isn't good enough to get stolen, yet there's a very small chance of that happening, yet they're crafty enough to remove it.

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She's a maniac~

If the admins are clever enough, they might be waiting until the join rate for that group sort of flattens out, that way they can ip ban (if that's possible at dA) a larger quantity of the trolls. It's like fly paper.

They'll just be back, though. The more you try to enforce order, chaos just adapts. It's like a virus. The only way to stop this sort of behavior is to kill it at the root, but that could take decades or centuries.

From what I know, they no longer do IP address banning.

An update on the troll. I found out that the account got hacked, and that the hacker is using the poor person's account to steal art and troll people. My friend told me that there's signs that you can tell that they've gotten hacked. Here are a few that he stated.

#1. Their submissions have short titles and are lowercased letters. ex. hi you suck lololol

#2. They submit disgusting porn.

I even asked them if they hacked the account and they said,"How did you know?!"

I just need to tell everyone that this poor innocent person who just joined dA got hacked by a pathetic heartless troll and is doing things they don't deserve.


Edit: Actually I could be wrong. Someone said that they were trolling since they came here. So I could be wrong.

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She's a maniac~

Well you can never be sure if they got hacked or not. Truth is, many people who HAVE hacked an account wouldn't reply on private messages, instead they upload pictures they found on the internet to let the account get banned, even I don't see any logic for behaviours like that. Also they would send spam-messages on the frontpages of the friend's list, sometimes with links that are full of viruses and such. In that way they can spread the viruses over the whole community and hack into several accounts within a few seconds.

I myself hate Art thieves very much, and I report them without hesitating. I draw by myself since over 16 years now and I have an DeviantArt account, and I can't even understand people who have an account on Deviantart and are good artists; some of them don't put an watermark on their pictures, and I always wonder why. It's no wonder that thieves can get through all of this if the original artist hasn't added an watermark into the picture/s and deleting them out of their accounts instead of just moving them into the SCRAP-section so you can find the original artwork again.

Also I don't believe that the Admins of DeviantArt "deactivated" the IP-Banning. Remember that some people can also log-in through internet-café's or from a friend's PC - yes, they even could use a IP-changer for FireFox users. I don't think that DeviantArt is THAT stupid, or at least the Admins.