Whether it’s the formation of anti-plagiarism groups, of which there are now several, dealing with uncooperative hosts, or tackling commercial infringement of the community’s work, deviantArt has always been there.

However, of all the cases I’ve tracked and even worked with the dA community, the most recent scandal, the Art4Love case, is perhaps the best example of it. deviantArt is a site that does not tolerate artistic plagiarism and is at war with the site’s former owner and artist, Chad Love Lieberman

The story, however, is a bizarre one and a case of an investigation that is still struggling to discover how deep the rabbit hole goes.

About the Art4Love Scandal

A week ago, Art4Love was a thriving art site that sold paintings by a previously well-respected artist named Chad Love Lieberman. The site sold a variety of paintings supposedly from the artist in a price range mostly between $199 and $1,000.

However, that began to come crashing down when artists at deviantArt caught wind that much, if not all, of the paintings on the site were ripped off from their community. What started as a trickle of plagiarism reports quickly, through community digging, grew into a torrent, now at a reported 300+ alleged infringements.

The scandal quickly grew to also impact other sites Lieberman was also involved in. This included MarkYourSpot, allegedly a direct copy of Art4Love, OfficeBrokers and LifestYle Brokers, both sites where Lieberman is, or at least was, listed as an associate.

The scandal also began to impact other names associated with Lieberman, this included Craig Pravda, who some believe to be the same person as Lieberman, and was allegedly a business associate helping Lieberman with his sales.

As the scandal quickly grew, it began to draw more and more attention outside of the deviantArt community. At least one news site retracted a previous story about Lieberman, and anther printed a call to deviantArt artists who had been ripped off to have their works features after they published an article promoting Lieberman unaware that much of the work would turn out to be plagiarized.

But even as the art case was gaining publicity, others were looking into Lieberman’s text work and not only finding signs of plagiarism in his two books, but also discovering that many of his articles were also verbatim plagiarisms, mostly from the same source.

On Lieberman’s end, all the sites associated with him directly, as well as his various Facebook pages and other social networking accounts were shut. However, deviantArt members had been diligent in grabbing screenshots of the site and several had formed lengthy side-by-side comparisons of the works on Art4Love and deviantArt.

These images enabled the comparison work to continue despite the closure of the various domains.

One of the artists who had their work used, George Smith, sent an email to an address associated with Craig Pravda and received a response saying, in part:

Apologies for any issue that you may have with Art4Love from whom we licensed the images.

In no way were we aware that they misrepresented their rights to any of the artwork that was used on our site MARK YOUR SPOT.

….

They have stated that they sold their entire collection to a new company and that we will have to continue with our game MARK YOUR SPOT, which only sells BRUNCH CARDS, by acquiring new content or working with our own digital artists.

Finally, another of the artists involved, Alexiuss, claims to be working on and accepting donations for a class action lawsuit against Lieberman.

It seems likely that this case is far from over, though it remains unclear just how strong the prospects for a class action suit are in this case.

My Thoughts on the Matter

This is one of those plagiarism cases where you don’t need a plagiarism expert to tell you about the infringement. There’s no need for a complicated analysis nor is there need for any side-by-side comparisons. The images are the same and it’s as simple as that.

On that note, this is definitely one of the most egregious acts of plagiarism I’ve run across in a very long time. Not only due to the scope of the infringement, including hundreds of paintings, content from two books and several articles, but also the nature in how it was being used.

Given that Lieberman has posed for newspapers in front of “his” paintings and repeatedly said in the press that they were “his” creations, there’s no doubt in my mind he can be described as a professional plagiarist. While professional plagiarists are fairly common, to see one to this degree is a very rare thing.

The biggest problem with this kind of plagiarism and especially with one this large and dedicated is separating truth from fiction. Despite the diligent work for the deviantArt community, there’s a lot of uncertainty about this person, how he does business and with whom.

Plagiarists at this level rarely are who they claim to be. Though I’m not saying that any of the information that is available is inaccurate, I’m saying there’s no way to be certain it is or isn’t without an independent verification. (Note: This is why I’m not talking too much about reports he is Senator Joe Lieberman’s nephew.)

In my experience, operations like this one are typically not run like an amateur artist who got desperate and plagiarized a few pieces, but more like a criminal organization started from the ground up for the purpose of plagiarizing and profiting from others’ work. This, likely, plays a role in the quick disappearance of Lieberman and will likely frustrate any attempts to sue him.

Of course, any attempts to sue him will also likely be hindered by U.S. law. Any artists infringed, even if they are abroad, will only be eligible for actual damages (the greater of what he made or the artist lost) and won’t be able to claim the high statutory damages (up to $150,000 per work) or attorney’s fees. Even registering now, after the infringement, won’t help with damages though it will enable U.S-based artists to sue.

In short, as despicable as the plagiarism is, there may be very little that the courts can do in this case as any copyright lawyer is going to be reluctant to touch the case with a lot of up front legal costs.

In the end, the best that one can likely hope for is that the site stays shut down and Lieberman doesn’t make a return.

Bottom Line

What amazed about this case isn’t just that it happened, but that it took so long for it to be found out. It’s not as if Art4Love was a small site hiding in the corner. It was out in the open, seeking and getting media attention all the while selling duplicates of artwork from deviantArt.

Of course, it wasn’t just images. It was also text in books and articles involved. But with so much lifted, it’s amazing that it took as long as it did, at least a few years, for the infringements to be noticed.

But while justice may be slow, it does prove that it does come, especially when you do something so broad and so egregious. There was simply no way that Lieberman would not be caught and, right now, he should be amazed that he had as long of a ride as he did.

After all, each plagiarism is like playing a game of Russian Roulette. You know eventually the odds will turn against you, but you hope it isn’t this time.

Note: Infringement samples taken from this post.

Update x3: This article has been updated, see the information below. Hammerfall is a well-known role-playing game for Facebook. The application has nearly a quarter of a million monthly users and is rated (currently) at a 4.5. However, the game and its creators, Dennis and Mark Kimbell, have found themselves at the center of a serious controversy as a series of deviantArt artists have come forward saying that their artwork appears in the game without their permission.

The controversy is already making waves on deviantArt following a news post by Melissa Findley, one of the artists who has work appearing in the game. She has posted screen shots showing her artwork and other dA artists within the game, which has caused a great deal of attention to be focused on her post in the dA community.

However, this controversy seems poised to only become increasingly ugly as the situation has become much more heated in the past 24 hours. To make matters worse, it involves another old foe of the dA community, Photobucket.

The Story So Far

Earlier this week, Findley was told by a friend that some of her artwork appeared in the popular Facebook RPG. According to her, she began to research the issue and found that a large amount of the artwork in the game, potentially thousands of images, were from various artists on deviantArt.

Hammerfall, which earns revenue in part by selling “honor points”, uses many thousands of images as part of the game, most of them icons and avatars, most used to represent in-game places, people and things.

She, discovered that the images in the game were hosted in a Photobucket account that was open to the public. She, along with a group of volunteers began to look through the various folders for images they recognized and identified hundreds of images that either definitely belonged to artists they knew or were likely from dA. They also used the image search engine Tineye to help them detect matches they were uncertain of and locate artists that they did not know.

As they continued their work, Findley posted a news article on dA (linked above), which is currently one of the most popular article on the site, to alert other artists and provide them with the needed information to get the works removed. She also published a list on her own blog of the artists that were affected along with links to the works from each artist they found being used.

The list, however, was far from complete and as they continued to work on locating as many artists as possible, the situation became very heated. Several dA members went over to the RPG’s forums and left negative reviews and comments, for which many of them were banned as “abusive”. Likewise, Dennis Kimbell turned the Photobucket account to “private” making it so that Findley and the other artists could not easily go through the images in the gallery, turning the already tedious work into an even greater chore. Furthermore, as they continued, Findley reported that images began to get swapped out, making it hard to keep track of which images belonged to which artists.

The work of identifying and seeking removal of the works involved is continuing but, under the current situation, could take another day or more according to Findley.

Kimbell Responds

Kimbell’s response to the accusations have been fairly limited. He has not made a public posting on the games app page but had responded to the allegations at least two different times.

First, in a discussion thread on the game’s forum, Kimbell said that “All the art we used is either under creative commons license or similar, or we contacted the artists for permission, or was bought off of stock photography sites.”

Second, in a message exchange with myself via Facebook, Kimbell went on to say that he thinks it is likely that one of the stock photo agencies he did business with is the source of the problem but that the site “doesn’t seem to be around anymore”. He has not indicated which agency it might have been.

He also confirmed that he set the account to private and declined to reopen it, saying that “is because we don’t use a lot of the art in the account on the game. Also, our in house artwork for future levels is in there. We got permission more art than we needed for the game.”

Finally, Kimbell also confirmed that he has been swapping out images as he has gotten reports of infringement, though Findley has said that the swapping often replaces one image that is infringing for another from a different dA artist.

Moving Forward

At this time it is difficult to say where this is going. Kimbell has asked for a full list of the allegedly infringing works, a list that, according to Findley is many hundreds of images long. However, a complete list is almost impossible to create according to the dA users. Frustrated by the delays, many are following the steps in the original article and filing DMCA notices with Photobucket to get the images removed that way.

Meanwhile, the negative reviews and comments keep flooding in, the score of the game already dropping 1/10 a point due to a series of one star reviews, and the thread about these issues has over 80 replies as of this writing. It doesn’t seem like this is going to die away any time soon and the actions of Kimbell seem only destined to draw out the conflict.

Personal Thoughts

Whenever I approach these situations my first priority is to work things out as amicably as possible. This is why I approached Kimbell on Facebook.

However, Kimbell’s actions to me are very worrisome. He has repeatedly stated that he wants a list of all the allegedly infringing artwork but has done everything imaginable to thwart any attempt to compile such a list. First he switched the Photobucket account to private, then began to move images around and finally started using another account to host images.

If Kimbell were the victim of bad stock photo agencies and had kept proper records, it would seemingly be trivial to remove the images they bought from those agencies or at least identify and promise to remove them as time permitted. But, even barring that, artists were willing to do the legwork, but now, due to Kimbell’s actions, no matter the intentions, the only way to determine which images are infringing is to play through the entire game.

This has the artists, who were already upset, even more outraged and seems likely to only drag out the dispute and increase its intensity.

Conclusions

Obviously this is a dispute very much in progress and I will be reporting more as I get new information. As it sits right now, it is poised to drag on from some time and the actions taken by the game’s developers seem to be making things worse for everyone.

Hopefully this matter can be resolved quickly, but at this time it looks like it is going to be a drawn-out conflict. Sadly, two of the most likely outcomes involve either Photobucket shutting down the accounts involved or Facebook removing the game. Either way, it is the artists and players that are going to suffer the most.

What could have been a heated, but brief conflict will now be even more heated and longer lasting. One thing I’ve learned about the dA community is that they do not give up quickly nor easily.

Update

Shortly after this article was posted, reports began to come up about images missing in the game. It appears that Kimbell and others at the game are now working to remove the infringing imates. According to a forum poster, a note on the front page says the following:

“Apparently the website we paid good money to get our images from was a fake and did not have permission to sell some of the images, so we are working on getting rights to some of the artwork we use and finding new images. Expect new pictures to be back up hopefully within 24-48 hours.”

This is a rather stunning turn of events and seems to give credence to the idea that the images were purchased from an illegitimate stock photo library. I’ll update this article as new information becomes available.

Update 2 (6:20 PM CT)

There seems to be a great deal of chaos and confusion about what is going on right now. Speaking with Findley and other artists involved, there are reports of images going down, being replaced and being move. The reports seem to be highly conflicted right now.

What I can say with certainty is that Kimbell has set up at least one, possibly more, new PhotoBucket accounts and has moved a lot of the images there. This account was set to private by default. It appears that most of the images that were offline are now back online though. It appears that most of the “shuffling” has been more about getting images that were removed working again and not about replacing any misused works.

Findley and her team are working on it and have made some great headway. I have additional information that I’ve been asked not to report on at this time but I want to make it clear that the latest as of this writing is that the images are not being removed en masse, though some do seem to be disappearing, but rather, that they are being moved to a new account.

I will update as this develops.

Update 3 (02/06/09)

Earlier today, the images in the game began coming down and were being replaced by “Vote for this Image” links. I messaged Kimbell about this and he confirmed that all of the iamges are being removed, saying that “We’re starting over on the image thing and asking for people who play the game to help with their own art.”

In short, Kimbell has removed all of the artwork from the game and is encouraging players to upload and vote for the images that they want to see used. Kimbell also said that they will work to verify ownership of all of the images that they receive and will not accept any images that is not either uploaded by the creator or licensed under an appropriate license.

According to Kimbell, the images in the various Photobucket accounts should be removed sometime in the coming days.

This should put an end to this controversy though, obviously, the artists will be checking closely to ensure everything is followed through on.

As of right now, the petition has gartered nearly 900 signatures and is growing at a very rapid pace. This is due almost exclusively to a huge push from the art community itself, specifically the efforts by several well-known deviantART member including lone-mono, budgie and dozens of others.

I have to say that I have been thoroughly overwhelmed by the response and I want to thank everyone that has posted the petition and the original article on their site. Without your help in getting the work out, this would not have been possible.

Right now my plan is to allow the petition to collect more signatures. Once it reaches over a thousand signatories, I plan to present it formally to the PhotoBucket staff. I will resubmit every time the petition crosses another 500 signatures until we receive a response.

I want to stress that there is a need for both unity and civility at this point. Though emotions understandably run high with this issue, cooler heads prevail in these types of disputes. I want to encourage everyone to give PhotoBucket a chance to address these issues and to not take any unilateral action that could hurt the cause. The next steps are being being planned already and everyone will be involved.

Finally, to all of the deviantART members who are new to this site, I would encourage you to take a look at the Ripped Art Task Force. They are a great deviantART group that deals with the issue of art infringement in a strong, professional manner.

They are a highly recommended resource for deviantART members.

Again, thank you all for your support and please, continue to help get the word out there. As the saying goes, this battle has just begun!

Update 1 PM CT: We are now one of the top ten most active petitions on PetitionOnline.com. See Image Below:

Update 4 PM CT: Rather than send the petition end at the tail end of a work day, I will send it in first thin the morning. I will post updates here and to the other entry after it has been sent off.

The group, entitled the RippedArtTaskForce, opened its doors eariler this week and according to its description, is dedicated to the following things:

• Take complaints of ripped art & investigate to the best of our abilities and time.
• Work to have ripped art removed and/or sites taken down.
• Provide information and education on copyrights.
• Seek out sites containing stolen/ripped Art.
• Promote a safer site for the posting of art.

Walker, along with her other administrators Lauren, Anita and Dave, are currently pursuing several potential “rips” right now. They detail those cases on their site.

Anyone wishing to report a case of deviantArt works being stolen or request help with their own works on the site being lifted can either email their information to RIPPED ART@aol.com or by sending a note to dA member RippedArtTaskForce.

Finally, I will be providing assistance to the group, especially early on, helping them bring closure to some of the more difficult cases.

This is, potentially, a very valuable resource for dA members and a service that I will be following closely. I strongly encourage all dA members to take advantage of this group and, if you’re available, consider volunteering.

Almost at the same time, American fractal artist Deb Walker discovered that some of her artwork was stolen, some of it being sold as prints in Las Vegas, other images being sold on Ebay

Finally, digital artists Kyndi and Jeni Niquette also discovered their works were being stolen, both on other sites and, like Walker, on cigarette boxes sold using Ebay.

It is three very different thefts with one common thread, all of the artists above are all using deviantArt (dA) to publish their works.

Though likely just a coincidence, dA seems to be making a lot of plagiarism news these past few days. It raises the question whether or not dA, and sites similar to it, are more vulnerable to this kind of content abuse and, if so, what can be done about it?

Why deviantART?

There are several reasons why dA would be a very appealing target for someone seeking artwork to steal. However, those reasons are often tied to the very features that make it so appealing.

First, as the name would indicate, dA is a site known for its art. It goes well beyond photography and supports a wide variety of artwork including literature, paintings, sculpture and more. Though sites such as Flickr are often used by artists, dA is targeted at the market specifically. That, in turn, attracts a wide variety of artwork, much of it very of very high quality.

Second, dA’s search features make it very easy to find exactly the kind of art one is interested in and the subject they want. It is trivial, for example, to find oil paintings of dragons if that is what you wanted.

Third, dA closely integrates Creative Commons Licensing into its system. Many people either misconstrue CC licensing or abuse it. CC licenses also attract viewers, both good and evil, with reuse on their mind.

Fourth, dA, outside of a relatively weak watermarking system, does very little to help users protect their work. Artists who host their own content and run their own sites can take many different steps to protect their content and have much greater opportunity to prominently display copyright information.

Finally, dA’s demographics seem to skew younger with 37% of their members being between 18-24 and many members under the age of 18. Though age is not a factor in copyright ownership or protection, younger people are often targeted, theoretically, for their lack of experience with such matters and because their claims are often taken less seriously.

All of these facts should give artists a reason to pause and consider the role they want dA to play in displaying their art. However, they aren’t the only factors to be considered, there is good news after all.

The Good News

The good news is that, despite the recent spate of plagiarism complaints from dA members, there is little reason to believe that dA has a significantly higher rate of theft than any other site, at least at this time.

With 4.5 million registered members, a few such complaints are to be expected and the recent controversy on Flickr only further accents the point that these types of problems can happen anywhere.

When it’s all said and done, it seems that dA is not significantly more or less dangerous than any other site out there. Most of the limitations and problems with dA are similar to that on any other photo sharing site and are not exclusive to dA.

However, with that being said, there are several things that dA could be doing to help prevent these kinds of incidents. Most of them are very simple steps and some could be implemented almost overnight.

What dA Can Do

Though dA can not completely stop this kind of abuse, there are steps that it can take to reduce the problem.

1. Prominent Copyright Information: Right now, when you view a work on dA, the copyright information for it is only prominently displayed if either the work is licensed under a CC license or the user adds it manually to the comments. dA needs to prominently display the copyright information on all works, regardless of licensing and make it clear that non-CC licensed works are NOT in the public domain to stave off confusion.
2. Better Watermarking: dA offers an automatic watermark on uploaded works but it only works on images that are resized. If users want to display full-resolution images, they have to watermark them before they upload them. Expanding the watermarking system to go beyond resized photos is a must as high-resolution images are the ones most often taken.
3. Image Protection: Though transparent overlays and segmented images are not perfect tools for stopping content theft, they can help a great deal and can be implemented fairly easily, especially overlays. It would be up to the user to turn this feature on or off and could add an extra layer of protection for those very worried about theft.
4. Protecting Full Resolution Image: Very high resolution images, right now, can be downloaded without an account and are not tracked. Requiring an account to download a full resolution of an image would provide a deterrent and might make it easier to track down who is misusing the photo.
5. Provide Copyright Resources: Though dA has always been very solid when handling infringement on its own service, it provides very little information to its members to deal with infringement that takes place elsewhere. Some basic advice on this matter would be a great addition to their Help & FAQ section.

Though none of this would stop infringement of the artwork dA hosts on their site, it would reduce the number of incidents. Since most of these steps would be almost painless to end users, they are likely worthwhile even if they only stop a small number of cases.

Conclusions

With so many members, dA is destined not only to be a target of plagiarists, but also a home for them. However, dA’s commitment to battling art theft when it takes place on the service has not extended that deep into protecting its legitimate members.

Though there is still no reason to believe that dA is more or less safe than any other site currently available, there are things that dA can, and probably should, do to help protect its members. This is especially true since dA attracts many different kinds of artists, including many who spend a great deal of time and energy on their work, and dA, with a few reasonable steps, can help them protect that effort.

If nothing else, offering better content protection could be yet another selling point for dA as it looks to carve its niche in the increasingly crowded image and art community category. Protecting users copyright can be a great distinction in a field with a lot of very similar sites.

More than that though, it will help dA turn the focus away from these art theft issues and put it back where it should be, on the art itself.

With so many talented artists on the site, it is a terrible shame that content theft has been the topic of conversation lately.