Confusing art theft situation with artist:karashim tag.

edit: I realised that because I’m about to retag the images in question, link to artist’s tag will become useless, since images won’t be tagged with their name anymore. So here are images in question: >>931793 >>931800 >>931797 >>931796 >>931794 >>1108113 >>1249321. They all used to have artist:karashim tag, but read the whole story.
 
So, if you go and look at artist:karashim you might notice jumps in style and quality of latest art. Karashin themselves aren’t the thieves though, uploads up until 3 years ago are all their original art taken from their pixiv (and after that, i guess, they’ve stopped drawing mlp). The situation is a bit confusing.
 
There’s a person by the name MLP-FIM24 on deviantart that has uploaded a bunch of other people’s art and one of those was by Karashin, but as you can see on the da page the thief grabed a bunch of arts from a bunch of different artists, and now a lot of them also got tagged artist:karashim here.
 
The part where it’s getting wild is that here, for example, we have an image tagged artist:karashim and artist:mintpencil, and you might guess that “oh, it’s just a Mintpencil’s image that got misstagged Karashim”, but no, the link to the original sketch leads to MLP-FIM24 upload of a lineart and Mintpencil themselves have stated in the source that they have used it as a base.
 
And on top of that we have artist:mlp-fim24 tag that leads to artist:karashim result.
 
I think this needs to stop. I’ll try my best to remove artist:karashim from images that aren’t related to the artist and tag them properly, but I’m having a bit of a hard time finding original artists of those images (maybe some of them are actually by MLP-FIM24, but given a blatant art theft from multiple sources, I would guess that none of them are their’s). And also I want to ask mods to remove artist:mlp-fim24 tag assosiation.
 
edit: I’ve retagged images that I don’t know an artist of (which is most of them) as “artist needed”. They still have links to mlp-fim24 da pages though.

I’m at work right now but I will help you sort this out as soon as I am free tonight.

@Derpy Whooves  
Thanks :3
 
So far I have no luck finding original artists. Google reverse search gives me links back to MLP-FIM24 and other even less credable sources.
 
But I did found another piece of art that doesn’t belongs to Karashim and is taken from MLP-FIM24 da. >>746423. I also retagged it as “artist needed”.
 
I’m almost willing to give this dude a benefit of a doubt and say that these images are their’s, but again, given that I can recognize a third of their da uploads, some shinanigans are going on here. Maybe theft, maybe tracing, maybe edits, who knows.

@Derpy Whooves  
So, can artist alias between artist:karashim and artist:mlp-fim24 be removed (cause it’s still there)? Also, should I just leave those images as “artist needed” or tag them as “artist:mlp-fim24”, since I haven’t found any other origins?

@Background Pony #3826  
Sorry, got distracted by some reports. I’m looking into this tonight.
 
Generally speaking, it’s better for things like these to be reports.
 
Because we really respect privacy, even if someone is breaking a rule, I’m not going to be responding publicly to what’s going on behind the scenes. But I am looking into this and I’ll send you a PM as soon as clarity emerges.

In brief, and hopefully not exposing any private information, here’s my notes from all of this …
 
I’ve made sure the alias from ｱﾗﾋﾞｷｻﾗﾐ・ｳﾏｲ -> artist:karashim is ok - they are both the same artist.
 
artist:mlp-fim24 is no longer aliased into artist:karashim. You are right - they are clearly not the same person.
 
artist:mlp-fim24 is aggregating other people’s work, and claiming that they drew it.. I’ve removed their tag from images that they were aggregating and claiming as their own, and have updated their artist tag with notes to indicate that they are not the artist of the work they had claimed.
 
The images that still had their artist tag or that had sources that pointed back to the aggregator were:
 
were cropped from which was created by artist:spiritdodd (even though artist:mlp-fim24 claims they drew it for a comic they were working on. artist:spiritdodd has changed their name to artist:2-lettdodd, so I aliased them and added a link to their DA on their artist tag.
 
The following images that were previously associated with artist:mlp-fim24 need to be resolved:
 
- all I can find is aggregation sites all the way down. No idea who the original artist was.
 
- artist might be Chinese, because the earliest place I could find it on was on a bunch of Chinese aggregation sites, like artist:dandelion sound. Unfortunately, the trail grows cold in 2015 and I can’t find the image before that except on Chinese “Pintrist”-style sites.
 
- Can’t find anything at all to ID the artist. It’s probably cropped from something else, and the original has been taken down.
 
I’ve removed all sources that point to the aggregator’s DA account - we don’t want to promote people who do that, and all the “we don’t know” images are tagged both “Source Needed” and “Artist Needed”, which is exactly how they should be.
 
Thank you for letting us know about this, and for all your help researching it, and if you have any questions or if you have suggestions for other artist tags that are just aggregation sites, please do not hesitate to report them.

@Derpy Whooves  
Thanks for you hard work. I’m glad we sorted it out. I’ll report situations like this if I’ll encounter more of them.
 
Also, when you’re saying “it’s better for things like these to be reports”, you mean reporting through an image page report button? Like, reporting individual images instead of making a thread about it, yes?

@Background Pony #3826  
Yes - reporting the image, with the additional information you found in a text field, means that we can deal with it in PMs and behind the scenes. We’re not trying to hide that people are art thieves - people who steal other people’s art can be vile. But sometimes it turns out that it isn’t art theft, and if the accusations were public then sometimes an artist reputation can be permanently damaged even if there was really just a misunderstanding.
 
Too often I’ve seen someone accused of art theft, when they were actually the person whose art is being stolen, or it was actually an intentional collaboration that people confused with theft, and by the time it gets sorted out the person who was the original creator of the art has been driven out of the fandom and no longer makes art any more because of all the drama. But the thief remains active in the community because they’re just the kind of person who doesn’t care about public drama - or even enjoys it. And I’ll love to never experience that kind of thing again.
 
This time was fine - the person you reported was just aggregating other people’s art, and at some point decided that if it was on their DeviantArt gallery then it was “their art”. But other times it can end badly.

@Derpy Whooves  
Sure. I’ll report it next time :3