China-based "Artwisher" site ripped my stuff, & probably yours

[ShadenLines]

The evidence:

Go to the site & enter your username into the search bar & your work will probably come up, too. I've recognized illos from at least two other members here so far.

More bad but not surprising news: Artwisher is Chinese-registered. So I'm not sure what options we have from where we are: stateside, Europe, England & wherever else we Newgrounders live.

What can we do about this, folks?...besides contacting them & asking or demanding they stop ripping our stuff from here, that is.

[FinaLee]

At 11/13/23 02:23 PM, antmaster208 wrote:

Chinese-registered.
What can we do about this, folks?...besides contacting them

i saw you left this on ur artworks:

because of that, you could send a ceist & desist letter to the parent company, forcing them to terminate any listings for ur work. if they dont comply, take it to court

You can send C&D’s all day, but you’ll find it’s rather difficult to enforce your copyrighted works if the alleged theft is occurring in a different country, especially if that country is notorious for disregarding intellectual property rights.

In my non-expert opinion, I’d say your options are very limited beyond filing complaints against the domain.

[TurkeyOnAStick]

Yeah I saw this topic in the art forum, it’s an opportunity for amateur artists to simultaneously be outraged and boast that a web scraper has claimed their artwork.

Newgrounds has no control over that website.

[Thetageist]

Turkey’s general misanthropy aside, Cloudflare hosts the site, as the OP of the other thread found out, and we’ve already learned they’re willing to remove domains that are causing a problem. So the support email for Cloudflare is where everyone should take their complaints.

[aapiarts]

If you need more info about ArtWisher you should check Prismisho's thread about it. Here is the thread.

[Drazah]

After a couple pages on various threads on DA ToyHouse and Newgrounds.

Not only is it a data scraper, but I heard that it steals your images when you search for your stuff.

The results you get are typically the only results it has until you (or someone else) keeps searching your exact name (and website).

And even then, the website gets more traffic from people visiting it, basically no one is buying these from here, and if they do buy from this store, it's basic shit, and they never receive it.

It's still wrong of them to scrape from artists and put it for "sale" for their scam, but rest easy knowing that they aren't specifically targeting a group of people, making much money from your art, if at all, let alone automatically the moment something crops up on your art page (unless again, you specifically search yourself).

Ofc this is common knowledge, but some people immediately jump to conclusions, in times of stress, and or if you have anxiety. Such as myself.

Just refrain from going on the site to prevent traffic, and searching users up.

[Notakin]

At 11/13/23 02:23 PM, antmaster208 wrote:

Chinese-registered.
What can we do about this, folks?...besides contacting them

i saw you left this on ur artworks:

because of that, you could send a ceist & desist letter to the parent company, forcing them to terminate any listings for ur work. if they dont comply, take it to court

But don't fill out THEIR forums as this is a phishing scam ontop, they can snag up your personal details and rights.

[Notakin]

We cannot do anything as their copyright laws are as lose as a turd coming out of a cheetah with diarrhea. and we most certainly cannot fill in anything under the forums they handle as of course this is a phishing scam. and i doubt cloudflare would care.

but on the bright side i now believe my art has some form of value, even if their site just scrapes off of google.

[ShadenLines]

At 11/15/23 01:28 AM, aapiarts wrote: If you need more info about ArtWisher you should check Prismisho's thread about it. Here is the thread.

Yeah, I found it maybe five minutes after starting this one. Superb timing, right?

[UNCLEREGZ]

i definetly had a hunch it had to be based in some country with shit copyright laws

[DioShiba]

At this point there can't be much done about it besides all the artists going out of their way to harass CloudFlare and Hetzner Online GmbH about it respectively with DCMAs.

Eventually the site will be pulled off. As long as people are willing to look up how to file DCMAs against the site then they'll have to do something about it. Until then, y'all need to realize that this is just a scam site hoping to rip people off.