Anonymous Dickweed

Yesterday I got a snarky comment from a blog reader re: using art without giving an attribute.  I respect what they had to say and thought about it.  To prevent any LEGAL action, I purged the blog of all art and photography that is not my own or public clipart.  What I did NOT appreciate is the WAY they made their point. 

"Imagine is [sic] someone used your brilliant words the way you use someone else's art, without proper attribution, no credit at all. How nice."

I can almost hear the sneer in that "How nice" comment. 

I had been using images I found on the internet.   I admit that freely.  I don't think most people like to look at pages of unbroken text.  I especially find that internet readers prefer thing broken up by pictures.  Some of the images are mine.  Some not.  I was not pairing anyone's art with writing in some derogatory way to the artist.  Nor was I saying anything that I imagine an artist would be ashamed to have his/her work associated with.  Quite the contrary.  Some had attributes, others did not.  The anonymous critic (and aren't they all kinda cowardly hiding out there in the dark and jabbing at people who make and do real art) OBVIOUSLY didn't read any more than just this single piece, didn't look to see if other posts had attributes.  Just drew a conclusion based on ONE post and sent their shitty, snarky, anonymous post. 

The thing that the critic doesn't realize is that someone else has stolen my words to the tune of $8500 of them.  And that someone swiped a piece of my art and used it as part of his website.  Yeah, I got pissed about it.  So I get it.  I do. 

The reason I am posting today is not about the proprietary nature of Art.  Gawd knows I am all for that.  It's about the HOW.  Anonymity allows for a feeling of non-accountability where people can be rude as shit.  It's easy to assume you know someone when you read their blog posts, but you really don't.  And if something of mine published on the blog or represented elsewhere on the internet, were pirated and used in a favorable way, I doubt I would be overly pissed.  I mean it is MY responsibility as an artist to protect it from that kind of usage if I don't want that to happen. 

Lastly, to my eyes, the ONLY person who has a right to bitch about attributes is the artist themself.  Not some armchair wanna be writer/artist who's coasting through people's blogs- blogs whose entire readership is still in the tens who hurt no one.  I did take down the art.  But that isn't success you anonymous leaver of snark.  Success would be if I wrote something here that made you less an asshole.