Last Updated on 07/13/2015 by Chris Gampat
When photographers and artists learn about their work being stolen, they absolutely get angry. But when a retailer goes ahead and takes the images to sell for their own profit while cutting out the artist, then a bigger problem starts. Change.org currently has a petition against just such a thing.
Wallpart, an art retail store, has been accused of stealing photographs and creations from artists on DeviantArt–a community where lots of artists display their portfolio. At the moment of publishing this piece, they’re just shy of the 1,000 signatures needed.
From what the petition page states, Wallpart was contacted for commentary but they didn’t respond. From the looks of things, it also appears that this petition has been up for around a month and was started by Chelsea Cooper of Kansas City.
Indeed, there are many things that can happen now. The artists can all individually sue the company or demand royalties on sales. Artists may want to do individual things based on who they are.
Oddly enough, Wallpart’s Terms of Service state that they don’t steal from artists. According to the site “Wallpart.com only helps the user to find the images interesting him, the site uses data of the most known third-party search engines. Process of search happens at user’s browser.” They further state that the images aren’t uploaded to their own servers and instead hosted on third party servers. Finally, they also don’t claim responsibility for the images that the users purchase–which quite honestly sounds very shady.
Hopefully, an agreement of some sort will be settled or the story will grow into a larger case.
