During recent weeks many of our newer members have been submitting artworks and prints containing what they believe to be 'Stock' photographs only to see them removed by the staff as a violation of copyright.

The reason for this is that the 'stock' photography website you have chosen to use is not a valid and legal source of these types of photographs; they in fact lack any legal ability to offer their picture collection for use and redistribution.

These phony stock sites may be easily recognised by a disclaimer which is placed at the bottom of their webpages , within their Terms and Conditions page, or buried on their Legal page. The disclaimer will read approximately as;

All pictures contained on pages herein were collected freely from the internet and are believed to be public domain. If you are the owner of any of the images that appear on this site, please send an email to the webmaster.

The other major clue you will observe is the presence of scanned magazine cobers, supermodels, actors and actresses within the 'stock'. Celebrities and supermodels do not offer their images as free stock and no magazine is going to simply give away material which they paid a large sum of money for the right to publish.

The website Atpictures.com seems to be the most 'popular' of these false stock sites.

This disclaimer is an attempt to feign ignorance of a photographs or artworks copyrighted status by ignoring any posted copyright information and professing an automatic belief they everything they find is public domain since it was located on the internet; such as the artworks all of you have submitted to deviantART. This belief is of course a false assumption.

I urge everyone to double check the validity of your chosen stock source before you spend a large amount of time creating a submission which will be removed by the staff.

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Daniel (realitysquared)
Copyright & Etiquette Administration Manager,
Community Operations Division,
deviantART Inc.