Calling All Creator Platforms to Fight Art Theft

DeviantArt is deeply committed to DeviantArt Protect and our immediate focus continues to be on helping artists safeguard their work by expanding Protect's abilities for identifying potential art infringement, and exploring ways to improve and streamline the takedown process. In the near future, we aim to:

• Scan more blockchains

• Decrease the time it takes to detect potential art theft

• Work with external marketplaces to improve the takedown process

• Add an additional layer of protection to help thwart malicious bots

What's Happening Now?

As the NFT (non-fungible token) market explodes, so does the time-old issue of art theft. Unfortunately, many artists and content creators have had their art stolen to be minted and sold as NFTs by imposters trying to make a quick buck. This issue is impacting artists across the web on all platforms where they publish and share their art — including Twitter, ArtStation, DeviantArt, and more.

Although DeviantArt is the first platform to actively detect and report art infringements, that does not mean we’re the only platform experiencing the issue. It does mean that we're the platform most committed to combating art theft.

What is DeviantArt Doing to Help?

At DeviantArt, we cannot stand idly by while thieves steal our users’ art. In July, we launched DeviantArt Protect to help safeguard artists from art theft by scanning all new deviation submissions to the site. In August, we expanded DeviantArt Protect's state-of-the-art image recognition capabilities to also scan public blockchains and third-party marketplaces for potential art infringement in the form of minted NFTs.

DeviantArt Protect was developed in-house by DeviantArt with the purpose of protecting our artists from art theft. Our only collaboration with other creator platforms and NFT marketplaces is leveraging their APIs to scan for possible art infringement.

Since launching DeviantArt Protect, the number of new minted NFT images we scan per week on public blockchains has increased threefold, reaching over 3.7 million scanned NFT images per week.

So far, we've sent our deviants over 50,000 alerts regarding potential art infringement in the form of minted NFTs alone.

The Future of DeviantArt Protect

Looking ahead to 2022, we aim to make DeviantArt Protect even better by scanning more blockchains, decreasing the time it takes to detect theft, and working with external marketplaces to improve the process of reporting and resolving instances of art theft.

This week, we are rolling out an additional layer of our DeviantArt Protect service for protection against art-theft bots, including monitoring and blocking mechanisms. This will help protect deviants from malicious bots that copy their art without permission to mint as NFTs, and ultimately help to reduce the number of art infringements.

DeviantArt Protect is available to all deviants for 3 months after each work is submitted, with unlimited coverage on all deviations provided to Core Members.

What Can You Do to Help?

DeviantArt can't win the fight against art theft across the web alone. We're calling all web platforms who serve artists and creators to join us and integrate the DeviantArt Protect service. This will help extend our protection across all the platforms you use on the web.

Help us grow and improve the DeviantArt Protect service by calling on all your favorite platforms to integrate with the DeviantArt Protect service today to expand the protection.