[ requested by @starrii_sprinkIes ] It’s not okay to steal art. Would you go into an esteemed art museum, take a painting off the wall, and waltz off with it to tell all your friends that you made it yourself? Would you backpack a piece of art on the internet, upload it into scratch, and write that it’s your own original art in the description? If your answers to these questions are different, I’m genuinely concerned. What makes stealing art on the internet more okay than stealing art in a museum? The fact that it’s so easy to do? Art theft is not okay. You can’t just take something someone else made and claim it as your own. That’s not how it works. But some people forget that going too far the other way is exactly the same problem. One time I saw a comment on a project. I’m not going to say who was involved in this, but there was a project created awhile ago called… well, let’s call it “Cotton Candy”. A few months later, someone else, who didn’t have anything to do with the first person, made a project with the same name and a similar concept. And then someone decided to get mad at the second person for “taking inspiration” from the first person. In what way is this art theft? I know – because the person told me – that the second person didn’t even know the first project existed. But even if they did… it’s an idea. Ideas are not the same as art. All the art in the second project was completely original. And what’s wrong with taking inspiration? Inspiration is a positive word, so why are artists including “please don’t take inspiration from this!!” in their project descriptions? Some kinds of “art theft”, like color palette theft, character theft, style theft, and other ridiculous things, make me wonder who the real thief in the situation is. By forcing someone to give credit to you or to take down their project, they’re essentially surrendering it to you. Nothing they do is valid because they took inspiration from you. That’s you taking their pride and success from them, which is just as much theft as whatever they did to you. See, even if someone takes inspiration, recolors, traces, or even outright steals, they still have feelings, and hurting them is just as much an offense as the original theft. Dramatic example warning: It’s like the whole George Floyd situation. He may have done something minor wrong to begin with, sure, but the actions of the police officers were completely uncalled for and racist. If you send an army of followers to attack someone for stealing something small, who’s really the one to blame?
