cazcastalla

Thank you so much to whoever gave me the 3 month core membership - I am touched, and feeling blessed. I am looking forward to 2017 being a better year for me, and hopefully I will be able to return to producing some stuff a bit more often.

Thanks again - you know who you are xxxx

I have given many Core Membership gifts in the past - but I have now hit hard times and have not been able to maintain my own.

Today I received an anonymous gift of one month of core membership - and it has brought me to tears... I actually didn't think anyone on here cared much about me - I have a suspicion who gave it, but whoever you are - I hope you have a very Merry Christmas and an extremely prosperous 2017. That wish extends to anyone and everyone who reads this xxxx

I know some of my watchers have known about the problems I have had with my wrist/hand since I had a fall 3 months ago... I finally got my entitlement to free healthcare here in Spain, and was referred to the hospital today.

For the last few days I have been browsing the newest stock images, and I have found some that I absolutely love, so I thought I would share them with you.

I hope you like them as much as I do

It's been such a long time since I last wrote a journal entry - I guess that shows how boring my life is.... nothing to say!!!

But I have something to say now!

I have been accused of being an art thief because I published someone's work on my blog without their permission.

Okay, I hold my hands up, perhaps work shouldn't be published elsewhere without permission, but my point is that the title and artist were listed and the image linked back to the page of origin (deviation page).

As a blogger I consider that I have certain responsibilities to abide by the license that the work is published under. If it is Creative Commons, and if the artist has not specified in their comments that they don't want their art published elsewhere, I consider it is reasonable to use those images in a feature - after all, it is a great form of advertising for the artists.

Here is what Wikipedia says about the Creative Commons license:

A Creative Commons license is one of several copyright licenses that allow the distribution of copyrighted works. A Creative Commons license is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use, and even build upon a work that they have created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, you might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of their own work) and protects the people who use/ redsitribute an authors work, so they don't have to worry about copyright infringement, as long as they abide by the conditions the author has specified

As most art is published under a Creative Commons license, I have assumed that as long as I credit the artist and link back to the page of origin, I am abiding by the stipulated rules.

Anyway, this isn't the first time I have been accused of theft, so I stopped publishing photo manipulations quite some time ago, and I now try not to use art from dA - which is very sad, and if I have been affected this way, you can be sure a lot of other bloggers have been also.

dA and it's members rely to a degree on outside intervention - it encourages more membership and it further promotes both the site and the artists.

I was also accused of removing name and watermark - hey, I wouldn't know where to begin even trying to do that! The images were published more than 18 months ago and neither name nor watermark were present then. I know members think that their work being published elsewhere could lead to theft - but blogs usually post images no more than 600px wide (in my case, all images are 580px wide). Although easy to reduce the size of images, enlarging them seriously degrades the quality, making theft for profit or gain much more difficult.

Let me know what you think - am I stealing art by publishing it without permission?

Over to you - I hope you will contribute and make a sensible conversation about this issue.