Someone has started a petition on Change.org for DeviantArt to take their art theft issues more seriously! 

The letter to be sent to DeviantArt is as follows: 

To: +spyed, Deviantart 

Please add a theft policy and take reported works more seriously!

With over 14.5 registered members and 3.8 million weekly visits, Deviantart, an art sharing site, should have an anti-intellectual property policy. Among the roughly 140,000 submissions that Deviantart receives in a day, there are bound to be stolen pieces published.

While Deviantart not have an anti-theft policy, it does have a report button. However, the Deviantart staff does not always take reported works seriously. Personally, I have reported both “deviations” as well as people who have an entire gallery full of stolen works to no avail. Each time I report something, it does not get removed. When I reported art theft directly to the staff, I got this response:

“Thank you for contacting deviantART, I will be assisting you with your support ticket.

My apologies but you have misfiled your support ticket. Since you are reporting a possible problem concerning deviations you should actually not be reporting this issue to deviantART Customer Service Center at all.

Claims of Copyright Infringement can only be legally filed by the actual copyright owner of the infringed work or by their legally authorized representative. Since you are not the owner or an authorized representative your notice on this matter is not considered to be legally valid and cannot be acted upon so your ticket will be marked as “Solved” in order to clear it from the queue; please contact the actual copyright owner(s) so that they can file a valid claim with us if they so choose.

While you cannot file a valid claim of copyright infringement in this particular case, as a member of deviantART you are able to use the Moderation system which can be accessed by clicking the ‘Report Deviation’ link found on every deviation page in order to point out to our staff that there may be permissions issues with certain deviations, but please understand that these Moderation reports will not be treated as a valid claim of infringement and will not receive the same type of response or attention.

Kind regards,

[name removed]”

Please understand that this is extremely unfair to individuals who have their art stolen and reposted on Deviantart because they don’t have a corporation or any sort of large power other than lawsuits to back them up.

[Your name]

We hope you’ll sign this and support artists around the globe in protecting their works!