There’s a discussion going around the erotic MC community, and it’s an important one.
Our community has an attribution problem. Quite often people who manip or caption images don’t give any credit to the people who originally created those images.
In some especially egregious cases, people are even running Patreon campaigns to profit off of their re-use of these images. Now, I’m not even going to begin to talk about the legal issues of copyright and licensing, I’m simply going to say: if you use someone else’s work without crediting them, you’re stealing. It’s theft, It’s not okay.I see a lot of people claiming this behavior is “harmless”. And what that tells me, is that they respect content thieves more than content creators. They don’t seem to understand that the people who created the original content are people. And really, if that’s your position: fuck you. You’re part of the problem.
image source: my tits.
…yeah.
Jukebox is, frankly, wrong on this one. I’ve been wrong on this one! I’ve generally just reblogged the images I use, but not dug deeper than that for sources, and that is unacceptable. I can give no excuse, and no real reason other than disrespectful laziness.
So: I am sorry. It was wrong, I should have known better, and I’m not going to do it anymore. My Patreon queue still has one caption in it, but I promise that starting with the next batch of images:
- Where images (drawings, photos, whatever) have watermarks, I will leave them in place. (I’ve already been doing this.)
- I will leave in any extant source attribution. (I’ve been doing this on Tumblr, but inconsistently on Patreon.)
- Where there is neither, I will make a good-faith effort (Google Image and Tineye searches) to find and credit the source.
- I will not reblog images from indie creators (artists, photographers, models) that I cannot attribute.
I am not going to go back and add sources to every single old caption in my Patreon immediately, but if/when I post those images to Tumblr, I will follow the above rules as I do, updating them on the Patreon and including that info here on Tumblr.