Who did this?

https://kemono.party/patreon/user/11200775

Whoever it is, it is one of us and please undo it (I bet you can’t). I have a pretty good idea of who it is but since I’m not 100% sure, I’m not using the ban hammer on the account yet. If he’s an actual creep and not some misguided kid, he’ll just make or steal a new account!

To be clear, it’s not about the money. It’s never about the money… I have a successful career which provides for my family. The money is just an excuse not to let it all go unrestrained to content hogs like e-hentai.org, 8muses or 4chan in the first place.

Or sometimes the money is used to treat myself to a piece of computer hardware that I would not buy for myself if it wasn’t for the continued growth of the Blooperverse.

In the last decade, I have given hundreds of free issues of my old stories to people who just asked nicely.

I do not hold any grudge against people who acquire pirated material. Only those who do the “so called sharing” and hide behind having higher morals than the merchants they are ripping off. (Art should be free dude!)

I also profoundly loathe enterprises that profit from scraping the content of others.

I did what was required and asked Kemono to remove my stuff for DMCA reasons. But I don’t expect them to do it, I’d bet a paycheck they’ll be total douches about it and use some lame excuse not to remove it. How so? Because they’re already dicks for building a website with the sole purpose of profiting from other people’s content without consent. Why bother acting honorably after that?

So what more does that tell me beyond Kemono’s Douche bagginess?

Patreon doesn’t put much effort in protecting their creator’s IP.

What’s going to happen, what am I going to do against such careless content sharing?

I don’t know yet… Probably not much, I might no longer share new “exclusive” content directly through Patreon. Patrons will still get exclusive stuff, but I’ll share it in a way that makes it harder for scrapers to get to. I expect the stories to land on other sites sooner or later and that sucks.

I don’t have energy to waste fighting pirates and being angry. I put my energy into building my own website hoping that my image is what I make of it and not what some random dude decided to share. I also put my energy into writing and rendering stories for myself and for the people who like similar things.

But when sales go down and user engagement goes down (it’s already low)  When those good people become silent and start trusting a different, illegitimate and untrackable source to access my content… (how many views did the Kemono page with my name on it get?) You start to think that you’re basically the only person who cares about… The Blooperverse, the game project, the stories…  How will I know that I’m not truly alone in this deviance?

On the bright side, Deviantart keeps growing!