The ripper has now been banned from DA courtesy of Lolly. Thanks Richard, you rock!

I'm going to leave this journal up as a lesson to those of you who think just because we (artists, studios and software publishers) release work to the internet, that it's "fair game" for you to steal.

You expect to see art theft and ripping in the dark shadows of the internet, but not here in the light that is deviantART.

Today, I was approached by a user to beta test our software. Of course I checked him out. What I found was our Hyperdesk logo, DarkMatter icons, work we've done for Disney and eZanga all over his gallery. No permission to distribute any of this especially our icons. What's worse is he brags about stealing and ripping other people's artwork. So who is this art thief?

Here he is on deviantART: [link]

Here is an excerpt from his website in his own words. This basically tells you how he feels about all of the artists here who create original artwork:

"Do you love icons? Do you love stealing them illegally? If your answer to these questions is YES, then you are my type of person... From many months I have been browsing deviantART and other such such art sites who allows people to publish their arts after paying a hefty amount to the site creators. One such person whose arts are really great is Alexandr Zhukov. He creates icons and web interfaces but most of his work is only accessible to the site owners or thru images of his artwork. He doesn't share the icons or images b'coz obviously the site owners must have asked him not to (no mistake of his). But I have been reading the other users comment on his art. They were telling him to actually upload the icons as they believe that images are of 0% use. But here is the time where are disagree b'coz I can rip icons from images and I have ripped many such icons of many image uploaders from the sites like deviantART and The Skins Factory. As Soon As I complete my collection of such ripped icons I will upload them here on this blog and I assure that they will be HD Quality. Also you will see that site logos have been converted to icons."

On his site he brags about distributing cracked software from numerous software companies. The majority is from Microsoft. I sent a General Manager i know at Microsoft his name, domain url and explained what he's doing. Microsoft has a huge presence in India and therefore a lot of legal muscle. I received his response... "Thanks. On it"

I've filled out 7 policy violations today and have asked for a ban of this individual from deviantART. He has no respect for any of us and therefore does not belong here. I'd ask you all to voice your opinion to the admins of the site and to this user. Time to say... this ain't happening in our community.

Update 1: Good riddance to him. Now he still has to deal with Microsoft.

Update 2: I just contacted the site he uploads his warez to (RapidShare) and said if he's not banned we will hold them responsible for future infringements of our works.

Update 3: His site/blog is now down also. That's good news.

Update 4: Guess being banned once wasn't enough. Now he's banned twice. I hear third time's a charm.