Open-mindedness and Objectivity

Yep, I finally received a response from deviantART regarding my bannishment today. Needless to say, I'm a little pissed off right now so I will let our respective responses speak for themselves:

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I apologise for the delay in responding to you.

In reviewing your request, I note that you have previous copyright violations within your gallery and therefore I'm reluctant to reinstate you to the community. Not only that, but you misrepresented yourself to many artists, and therefore there's a breakdown in trust.

This leaves us with no option other than to wish you the best in finding a community which does have a more tolerant approach to such issues, however we have no place for such in deviantART.

Kind regards,
Fiona
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Fiona Hooley
Director of Community Operations
deviantART.Inc
http://chix0r.deviantart.com

Nov-10 2009 08:34 am.

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My response

Specifically, what previous copyright violations are you referring to? I am only aware of the one, or rather, the alleged one. I have spoken to several artists who have had multiple violations for copyright infringement, multiple violations for prohibited content, have been suspended multiple times, and yet they still remain within the deviantART community. Everyone I have spoken to since being banned is of the opinion and agreement that my punishment is vastly disproportionate to the infraction.

On the opposite side of the coin, I personally know of at least one individual (and I'm sure there are hundreds, if not thousands of individuals like her/him) that has had a dozen or more works removed for blatant copyright violations, been reported numerous times for harassment and/or overtly racist remarks to other artist, and routinely uses other peoples work without their foreknowledge (i.e. Art Theft). All of this individual's violations far, far eclipse anything I have deemed guilty of, but what punishment has this particular individual received? None, zero, nada, zilch. Justice, apparently, is blind after all.

After being suspended in September for linking to what deviantART deems as "inappropriate content" I took a good long look at my deviantART gallery and purged all of the content whose source I could not readily verify. In other words, I deleted all of the pictures that various individuals asked me to color / manipulate, but they in turn may not have been the original artist of the work. What remained were works that I had permission from the original artist to color / manipulate, works in which I was the original artist, and photography that I personally took. Additionally, after my suspension ended, I immediately removed all of the offending links...and quite a few more that were even vaguely questionable. The only work that was even remotely questionable (and only because it resembled another work so closely) was the one that got me banned.

Did I violate deviantART policy with solely malicious intentions and/or intentions of misrepresentation? Of course not. Ignorance of the law, so to speak, is no excuse...but you cannot honestly expect every artist to read through hundreds upon hundreds of Frequently Asked Questions in order to determine whether or not their work will potentially violate deviantART policy. That's just plain idiotic. That however, is exactly what one must do in order to post (hopefully) violation-free media upon your site.

Granted, the majority of my works involve cartoon characters who are depicted in an adult manner, though not all of them in a sexual sense. Naturally, some people have a certain dislike (and even outright hatred) of this depiction. Conversely, a lot of people just plain love it and (obviously) draw / color them too. This "hate-love" is nothing new...you see it all throughout the various mediums depicted on deviantART. However, after my bannishment from deviantART I immediately sought to appeal this decision thinking that said appeal would be met with a certain open-mindedness, objectivity, and someone would listen to what I have to say in my own defense. No, what I got was the one individual who has a previous bias toward not only adult depictions of cartoon characters, but to the very individual characters I tend to depict. Don't beleive me? Read his journal entries. So much for open-mindedness and objectivity.

Nov-10 2009 02:49 pm.