Art News and Miscellany

I couldn't find a more appropriate thread, so I'm starting my own.

If you didn't already know, there are a lot of creative people out there. Many of these creative people also post their stuff online...DeviantArt, tumblrNew, Facebook, whatever. Some of these creations get plenty of likes and become quite popular.
If you are an artist (or know one), you probably also know that many of these posts get stolen by bots who look for highly-rated creative posts and turn them into unauthorized/unlicensed merchandise. Even a video game developer has had his work stolen and turned into a bikini.

Well, the artists have started fighting back...creatively.
See, people are now starting to post grossly flagrant copyright/trademark-infringing images and upvote them to attract the bots' attention, thereby tricking the bots into stealing and reproducing the properties of notoriously litigious companies and well...see for yourself:

teezyli.png

source - teezyli.com (for as long as they stay in business, I guess)

Some close-ups:
mickeybomb.png


yodabomb.png


It's almost like a weaponized version of the hotlinked image switch trope.

tl:dr; Bots are dumb. So is art theft.

--Patrick
 
I've been reading about this and it amuses the hell out of me!

Funny enough, long before this movement, Mr. Z sometimes scans Reddit and Google to see if someone is trying to use my artwork without my permission, which has occured on few occasions, but mostly memes or someone saying something nice about it in a blog. However, recently, he found someone, or some bot, trying to sell it on a shirt on Amazon.

...except, while it did straight-up say it was my drawing, and it was a piece of fan art from a property I most definitely don't own, it wasn't my drawing. So I was oddly confused by the whole thing.
 
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