An important note to literally everyone that posts their artwork to Tumblr
There is a site called Gramunion that takes every single image posted to every single blog on this website and reposts it to its website, removing the original context of the images, including artist’s notes, requests to not repost artwork, and so on. The website does this as a way of “helping” you “Browse Any Tumblr Blog In a Structured Way!” (to quote their website).
We can all agree that this is garbage, right?
As a result of this website’s existence, I’m seeing more artwork posted to Pinterest and other websites, using Gramunion as the source.
I’d like to see if something can be done. Because no matter how many DMCA takedown notices I send to Pinterest, there will always be idiots who get my artwork again and again from Gramunion. I don’t want that, I’m pretty sure no-one else wants that for their artwork, so what can we do?
I think using this guide here we can send DMCA takedown notices to the website to get our art taken down. Here’s what the website says:
Let’s assume “Phil” sees his 1,500-word blog post republished on a forum. His first step would be to issue a DMCA takedown notice to the DMCA agent of the forum letting them know of the infringement. If the forum does not take down the content, Phil would look up the hosting service for the site using a “Who Is” domain search, and serve a takedown notice on that company as well. Finally, Phil would serve notices on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. If all parties comply with the notice, the offending page would be removed by the host and delisted in the search engines.
The website also provides an easy-to-use template for sending a takedown notice. Seriously, it’ll take you about two minutes to fill out, if that.
I sent a DMCA takedown to Gramunion itself first. I tried looking up the “Who Is” stuff for the site, and it led to a site called “Name.com,” which would be the next stop if Gramunion refuses to respond to my request. (I sent Gramunion an email already last week, and they refused to respond.) I’ll keep you posted on how this goes.
If you’re serious about keeping people from stealing your artwork, then I highly recommend you join me in sending takedown notices to this website. Maybe we can eventually get it shut down.
gummygunk
blakekathryn
