fannish etiquette question

[ratcreature]

With the proliferation of Tumblr, what do you do if another fan just reblogs your pictures? I understand that one of the reasons people like Tumblr is because it is so easy to just post a bunch of pictures and video and such, but I do have a notice that I don't want my art distributed without permission, because I'd rather like traffic to come to my site than some random Tumblr or other site. (This seems to be an ongoing problem for me of late.) Am I just behind on the new fannish normal?

Comments

[sqbr]

Having recently gotten into tumblr myself I have been wondering how all these fanartists feel about being posted without attribution. It's not that hard to at least add a link and some attributing text and a lot of people don't even bother with that. I personally don't HUGELY mind the idea of someone putting my art in a tumblr post if they do add a link and attribution, but I can see why you might.

That said tumblr is a pretty good way to spread art if you post it yourself and don't mind it being out of your hands once you post. That way people can see that you posted it first and you can put a link to your site on your userinfo as well as each post, plus you get notified when people "like" it. Though if you do that and edit the post none of the reblogged posts will show the edit, and obviously this does nothing to stop people tumblering your art themselves nor should you be forced to do it if you don't want.

The culture of not attributing images online is pretty entrenched, isn't it? I notice it within art as well, lots of fanart which is clearly based on photos or using textures has no references given. I once had someone crop a photo of me to use the slogan on my shirt (that I had designed) as an icon.

[ratcreature]

The way images are treated really ticks me off. You should be more careful with images since you can't search for them easily like you can with text to find where they came from. And yet they just get grabbed all over the place in ways that would never be tolerated with fanfic in fandom.

[sqbr]

Absolutely. There have been so many times I've fallen in love with an image and have wanted to tell the person who made it, but there's no way to find out who they are.

[ratcreature]

Yes, it is really inconvenient for viewers too, not just sucky for artists. In most of my pictures my sig is rather prominent, but for example in my fake HP bestiary pages the sig would have distracted from the effect, so those are unsigned. Though if I'm ever continuing that series, I'd probably watermark the bottom with my web address, even though I dislike watermarks.

[sqbr]

I used to tend to not bother signing my work, I'm definitely going to more effort to remember now (thankfully "sqbr" is a pretty unique identifier) Of course not many viewers are going to go to the effort of typing in an address or googling even when they have the oppurtunity :/