Ethical Artwork Collection

Hello everyone,

We pride ourselves on not being ‘artwork thieves’ like the hordes of other content sites out there with no moral or ethical grounding. So, as you may be able to imagine, all of this recent bad publicity comes as a huge shock to us.

We thought we were doing things in an ethical way, based on this section of the deviantART agreement:

16. Copyright in Your Content

deviantART does not claim ownership rights in Your Content. For the sole purpose of enabling us to make your Content available through the Service, you grant to deviantART a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, distribute, re-format, store, prepare derivative works based on, and publicly display and perform Your Content. Please note that when you upload Content, you allow third parties to copy, distribute and display your Content.

We felt that the users of deviantART were posting their content with the intent of it being used by other websites. We felt that we were actually doing artists a favor by showing their work to millions of users.

However, with the recent influx of emails, we realize we were grievously mistaken.

We do not actively try to take advantage of anyone.

So why do we watermark the images with pYzam, if we don’t think we’re ‘stealing’?

We watermark to protect the content from being sold or distributed in an unethical way by other websites or sources. There are websites that actively seek to steal content and directly link to that content on our servers. If we watermark the images, these sites will not hot-link it and represent it as their original work.

We know that doesn’t ‘make it all better’.

So, this is what we are in the process of doing to remedy the situation and hopefully make amends with the artists that feel like they have been wronged.

We do not actively keep track of the source of our layout content.

However, we will make an honest effort to find and reference all artist work we have used via linking on the page distributing their work and via water-marking on the actual graphics in addition to ours.

There will now be an artist’s username or real name directly on all artwork created by them in addition to our pYzam branding.

If any of these artists come forward and wish for us to remove their work, we will gladly do that as well.

We feel with these additions we can be the first amoung hundreds of sites to actually help the amazing artists that create the graphics the world wants by giving them tremendous exposure.

Here is an example: http://www.pyzam.com/phplayouts/preview/548

Furthermore, if you would like for us to distribute your work in this way, please send us a link to your deviantART page, or website via layouts@pyzam.com .

Any artwork we seek out, in the future, we will seek permission from the artist directly, before posting it.

Regarding the ‘sale’ of our content: All of our content is free to everyone. We do not sell prints or the rights to any of this artwork. We simply have ads on our site that help counter the server costs it takes to provide everyone cool content from our servers.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us via our contact us link at the lower left of this page.

Also, please Digg this post so other users can see our response to our recent Digg post.

Regards,

pYzam.com