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The artist Astruma (@Astruma2)who defines himself as coming from Canada on his official DeviantArt account, reported that the Instagram account “Genshin Merchandising (@teyvatmerch).“has been taking his designs and selling them in physical form inside different products in Argentina.
“This shop/person on Instagram is selling merchandise they make with stolen artwork at conventions. Since they don’t have an online store I don’t know how to report this.
does anyone know how to deal with this stuff? Some artists whose illustrations have been stolen include: “@aura_draws”; “@zerotabi1210”; “@_cinkai”; “@sakonlieur””.
The news divided the Internet community on Twitter, inspiring comments such as the following:
- “Some guy stole fan-arts, sells them and you guys are defending him. Typical loser attitude. Grow up. Nobody owes you anything, but keep enjoying your A4 size printed imitations. Don’t forget to post your hypocrisies of “respecting the artists” afterwards.“.
- “There’s nothing better than stealing from Americans! I hope they keep doing it and they keep crying.“.
- “Why do people defend these types of situations? This platform never ceases to amaze me“.
- “I can’t believe that people defend this under the pretext of “Argentina’s economy is bad”. Well, we all know also that artists don’t have the best salaries and you’d be better off buying from them directly. Art is not a staple, if they don’t have money to buy it, then don’t buy it.“.
- “This is in Argentina, the economy is so screwed up that we barely have enough to eat. What did they expect? That we would pay $100 for an official art? The ones in the pictures sell for half a dollar or less. Either way, there’s nothing you can do about it. Keep crying“.
- “People are defending the theft of artwork, but how about defending the artists who had their art stolen for NFTs? When their own people do it they bring out their hypocrisy.“.
- “The responses are disappointing, that’s why every illustration I do carries my watermark. Stop playing the victim just because you know what you are doing is wrong. Stop getting aggressive when you have no way to defend this kind of actions, we artists are just trying to teach you how copyright works.“.
- “I know this is wrong, but here in Argentina (and almost all of Latin America) getting official illustrations in printed form is extremely expensive (shipping costs range from $20 to $50 and our minimum wage is $240). This is the only way many people have access to printed posters and illustrations.“.
- “We’re used to this and it’s very problematic, from stolen art to people at events choosing to buy that stuff instead of something from the artist. I don’t care if they are American or Asian artists, their art deserves respect.“.
At the end, the user “tony (@_sabit0)“, who in his description states that he is the administrator of the store in question, responded to the artist with the following message: “Well, to close, I think the yankees are really stupid, if they delete our account we still have support (thanks to all of you) and we will continue working as we did and we will continue producing things for the community in Argentina, we will not stop.“. In several of his other answers he pointed out that his earnings are “unparalleled“: “We make $0.02 on each poster, the artist bills as 100 from the comfort of his home in a first world country“.