A Note To Deviantart Users

By Xah Lee. Date: 2006-12-02

There is a site called DeviantArt.com, which i first heard of around 2004. Its like a blog site for visual artworks.

In Jan this year, i started to have a account on livejournal.com blogging website. There, they have a forum of illustrators. So, i started to see huge amounts of artworks by professionals and amateurs, and basically getting slightly acquainted with the drawing community. Seeing their works, their diaries. Also, recently i revamped my online Alice In Wonderland art collection and Visual Arts Collection . Since many art are hosted on deviantArt.com, i got a deviantart account for ease of talking to these artists and watching or asking permissions to use their artwork on my website.

As i started to use deviantArt site, i took a look on Wikipedia to see its history: DeviantART. Apparently, there's something i don't like. Quote from wikip:

which grants deviantART the legal permissions to re-use and even modify any artwork posted on deviantART (see in particular Section 3. License), as well as the right to sublicense any of that artwork to a third party at dA's sole discretion.

But further, it seems there's a big controversy involving a termination of one of their founder. The intriguing thing is, there seems to be a court order that bar any disclosure by the involved parties of the detail of this event. Here's a quote from wikip:

On July 29, 2005, (co-founder) Scott Jarkoff (AKA “Jark” or “Yellow Alien”) was terminated from deviantART staff, causing an uproar within the community. Various statements by deviantART regarding the issue have portrayed his termination as necessary, but most of the user base rejects this assertion. With Matthew Stephens' resignation in 2003, supporters of Scott Jarkoff assert that now neither of the founders remain in deviantART's administration. In contrast, Sotira insists he was a founder, and also the first full time working staff member of the deviantART administration. The deviantART administration has been generally tight-lipped throughout the incident citing legal restraints.

Here's Jarkoff's website, that contains some account of the event. http://jarkolicious.com/probes/2005/08/03/involuntary-termination/. Apparently, lawsuit is in progress, and the event seems to be centered about politics. It'd be interesting to watch it.

DeviantArt, as of 2006-12, is ranked as the 142th most traffickered site according to ~~http://www.alexa.com/~~. Too often the architecture of modern society makes individuals powerless, and a few extremely rich. If you are a DeviantArt user, beware, and watchout for their user agreement. You might want to check out a competitor http://www.storm-artists.net/.