That’s it. No more Miss Nice Guy.
I have tried talking to the members of the community. I have tried asking each individual member to please not use my art as I have come across them. I have contacted the Leaders and Curators of the community. All of it has led to this.
I am stating this plain and simple, now. The BATIM Amino does not, by and large, care about artists.
There have been individual members of the Amino who have tried to help me in getting my stolen art removed. There have been individual members who have immediately complied with my requests for content to be taken down, and who have apologized once they understood what was going on.
But now I am being mocked not only by the members of the Amino but even by the Leaders themselves.
This is a comment chain on a post by user “trash child” (their actual username; this is not an insult) that used my art without my permission. “MrTech579″ is a Leader of the BATIM Amino. I had spoken to him previously about the unfair use of my art, and he had seemed supportive. Now I find he is hoping I simply won’t notice instances of my art being used rather than actually dealing with them.
In another instance, a Leader by the name of “Wizard TSN” responded to my requests that my art be taken down from the app by using the very art I was referring to without credit or permission from me in a new post. The post has since been removed, but I am still enraged and indignant tht my request was so blatantly ignored and snubbed.
In the Terms of Use for the Amino app, under section 13, it is stated that the unlawful use of a work that is protected by copyright is prohibited. As I understand copyright law, the instant a work of art is created, the artist owns the copyright to that work of art. No paperwork is necessary to own this copyright, though it can be obtained in order to help defend it in a court of law.
Though I obviously do not own the characters created by TheMeatly, I do own the copyrights to all artwork I have created for the game. My copyright is being infringed upon repeatedly not only by various users of the community but also by the Leaders thereof, and nothing is being done about it.
I have contacted a representative of the Amino app’s developers about this issue and am waiting on a response. But for the time being, I will reiterate the point I made at the beginning of this post.
The BATIM Amino is run in part by moderators who do not respect artists’ ownership of their work. I say this as a warning to all content creators: watermark your work, and stay away from the BATIM Amino.
