I Love People Like This

During this past week I was unwillingly dragged into an all out flame-fest on a social media site, which I will refrain from mentioning the name of in order to protect the privacy of those involved. Needless to say, it got very heated, and finally mellowed out before this past weekend. I’ll try to give as short of an account of the situation as I can.

It started when a member of my forum posted a link to a member’s page on this social media site. On this page was a picture of her current project, a giant bead sprite of Link from the Legend of Zelda series of games, by Nintendo. It turned out, she found the picture I posted of my Link character, and copied it. Now, I know what you’re thinking – Link is Nintendo’s creation, so what’s the big deal? It’s not a big deal, per se, but I spent 12 hours (ballpark figure) hand-pixeling the image, beading it, then ironing it – and the pixeling portion of that took up the better half of the total time it took for me to finish that project.

Artists on the Internet are not always bound by any strict laws, but in the spirit of common courtesy and the Creative Commons rights, any work from which an artist derives his or her own artwork should be credited appropriately. I credited Nintendo for the image I used as a reference for my hand-pixeled sprite (from which I created a bead sprite), so it makes sense that this girl should credit me as the one who pixeled and beaded the artwork from which she copied hers, right? On top of that, she found a photograph of the art that I took and uploaded to the same site. So technically, she should credit me for the photography, the upload, the pixeling and the sprite. All other rights, as I rightly credited my sources, belong to Nintendo.

So I visited her photo of the artwork she derived from mine (without attribution) to find a few people from the forum had already left comments asking her to give me credit. That was very nice of them, and their comments were civil. So I added my own, as the artist himself, asking nicely for credit.

However, the responses we received were rather harsh, and basically calling them idiots and me a credit stealing jerk. This girl’s husband was the first to jump in, telling me that I was trying to take credit for the actual character of Link, as well as all related material that could be found online (not sure where he got that from, seeing as I gave credit to my source in the description of the image ). Additionally, he thought it necessary to declare that he had “seen people do things with bead sprites that [I could] only dream of”. Cute.

As this string of comments continued, I kept my composure and presented a very logical (and mature)argument, mainly defending myself against the couple’s false accusations and slander against my otherwise good name. I ignored their childish name-calling for the duration of the discussion, but near the end, they just spouted the same insults (credit stealing jerk, asshurt, Octopussy, etc.) and accusations, completely ignoring what I had previously said.

By the end of it, I decided it better to just walk away, since it seemed like these people didn’t understand ordinary concepts of attribution and artistic rights on the Internet. I got dragged back in briefly, to try once more to illustrate the situation, but they still didn’t understand.

So the aforementioned couple are not people I love, so you must be wondering who is? The answer is the guy below, who will remain nameless, and whom I never even knew before I he posted his comment:

Using some one else’s artwork as a model for your own without including an attribution to the original artist (and then doing your best to paint him/her as an egotistical dick when he/she shows up and politely asks for an attribution) is always a classy move.

As a small-time fuse-beading/pixel artist who is not affiliated with anybody else who’s posted here (but who has watched this conversation unfold from its beginning), I find the comments you’ve posted throughout the above discussion (and those of your husband, DeadTree Photography) to be a fairly ugly comment on both of your characters.

You seem to have been intent from the very start on taking what should have been a reasonable, civil discourse (and what was obviously intended to be one) into all-out flame-war territory. Ordinary behavior, perhaps, if you’re a heinous bitch or a total head-case (something I’m sure many more people than just myself are beginning to suspect you are), but not for the mature, adult human being you’d like to project yourself as. I’d recommend doing a thorough head-check on yourself (and on the way in which you react to simple attempts at productive communication by fellow artists) before responding with downright nasty ad hominem attacks of the kind that pervade your responses in the above discussion, or – I’m sorry to say – you’re going to be in for a LIFE full of heinous bitch-slaps and unsympathetic smackdowns.

In short, dear, please do make an effort to get your head together. A good first step might be taking some time off from participation in online forums/user-generated content websites (like this one) until you have developed the maturity and class to fess up to your error and to apologize for the COLOSSAL effrontery you have displayed toward a real Perler bead artist who A) took the time to create something that was (at least partly) original, and B) had the decency to properly credit his source.

“Octopussy”? *rolls eyes*

Grow up or GTFO, hunny. The real world doesn’t tolerate your brand of self-indulgent bullshit.

So yeah, I love people like this, who just jump in and make a smashing point.

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