Art Theft and Sharing

Recently we introduced a small little addition to deviation pages: small buttons which, when clicked, help you share a link to the deviation page on facebook, twitter, digg, and reddit. A noisy bit of drama (or dArama) has accompanied the addition, with people exclaiming (incorrectly, mind you) that these links make it easier for people to "steal art" or even suggesting that we're putting artwork off the site and somehow make extra money in the process.

spyed wrote a brief rebuttal to the drama that's been spreading around, and you can read it right here.

In addition to what he wrote, I'd just like to say that the outrage at these links has been ridiculous and completely out of hand. The buttons that we added to enable easier sharing do one thing: they paste links to deviation pages. They do the exact same thing you could do by yourself just by copying the URL from the browser address bar and pasting it someplace. They're not making it any easier to steal art.

What's more, within dA there is a culture of popularity that is encouraged by both the community and the administration. We have a "popular" filtering metric on nearly every area of the site involving artwork, and the majority of our artists strive to become popular by asking people to +fav their work or simply leave a comment. People around here feel like they NEED popularity, and in many ways that's perfectly fine and good. Suddenly, we make it 1% easier for people to become popular by linking to their deviation pages from outside of deviantART and it's a problem? Isn't this backwards? People want to become popular only through the limited means of deviantART and not through the means of exposing themselves to non-deviants?

I've also been reading comments from people saying stuff like "you understand why we'd be upset" and I feel compelled to say a resounding NO. We don't understand the upset surrounding this because honestly it's all completely misinformed! The idea that dA would build and implement a feature to encourage "art theft" is downright ridiculous. We hire and pay a whole team of people to find/remove copyright infringements and our community thinks we want people to steal their work? Admins aren't supposed to say stuff like this, but that's stupid.

So please, take a moment, catch your breath, and realize that all of this drama is for nothing.