!! This is copy-pasted off a debate, please spare any typos !! Context - someone was pointing out/implying that the toxicity in the community is because of the art community and this is by debate against that XXXX speaks of people harassing others, and vaguely covers some aspects of the toxicity in the art community. From what I can gather, XXX isn’t a part of this community, and blames the toxicity on us. Yes, some of us can overreact. Yes, we are human. Yes, we make mistakes. But we are NOT some sort of hive mind that you can blame everything on. Now, moving on from that, the cause of this is sort of complex. It, in most of our eyes, is the root of ‘art theft’. Let’s categorise it. Tracing, straight up stealing, and recolours. 3 very common things in the art community. Number 1, tracing - now a huge variable in this is credit and another one is valid remixes. The ST claims, “(just) scribbling over a project and remixing it is not a valid remix”. I’m unsure is recolours fit into that, but in my eyes, they may. Now, the st also claims that the remix tab above a project when remixed (thanks to <user> for the original project <project name>) but that’s quite an interesting argument. This is automatic credit, one might say, it has other purposes. The user remixing doesn’t acknowledge that they can credit the ‘artist’ (par the cruel situation in which the remixer CHOOSES not to give credit) which would absolutely lead to disputes between scratchers. Some artists may say that tracing/recolours are absolutely fine with credit. Some don’t want that. But that leads an entire different point of view. Let me say this very quickly. It is not scratches problem if you don’t want to deal with a sit DIRECTED AT CHILDREN. It is not scratches problem if you aren’t able to get other social media to share your art on (eg, da, th, ig). I cannot stress that enough. Now let’s move onto tracing. There’s another point of view here apart from what I previously I said. You CAN use tracing to practice. That’s how I learnt, that’s how some of the most talented people on this site learnt. But I, nor they, ever passed it off as their own work. My point from the previous comments about tracing still stands. Now we come to a very different situation. Art theft. Everything on scratch is shared under cc laws. Wether you know that or not, it has a giant impact. One can argue that small 9 year olds finding a cool looking picture and posting it as their own will learn and grow up to the fact that in general, stealing is bad. But there are more mature people than that. I’d say, there was stolen work, just politely tell them that there ARE lawsuits against this. There CAN be jail time involved. If they were to do this in another site, they would get the utmost (quoting here) rude awakening. You can get a criminal record at the age of 9. There will be consequences for this terrible PURGERY that they’ve committed. In summary, there is a giant web connecting anything to everything in the art community, and cannot just be blamed on a singular (vague) action.
