Now we all know there are a good number of legitimate, legal stock resource sites out there with some being free and some being pay sites. A good chunk of you all can name them off the top of your head so I won't bother to list them myself.

Now regardless of which one we might be taking about, they all share pretty much a common rule; you cannot sell or redistribute the images you get there. For those of you who are legalese impaired that means you cannot pass the stock image around to other people; if someone wants it they must go to the same place you got it from.

And here is where the problem comes in.

It's come to my attention that a bunch of deviants here seem to believe that they can simply 'raid' a good stock website and then submit those resources into their deviantART account and offer them in our Resources Gallery.

Sometimes they manipulate it slightly; give it a hue or desaturate the colors, or some other minor inconsequential thing but the end result is that they slap it into their gallery as a Resource.

This is expressly forbidden by the Terms and Conditions of the original site where they grabbed it from because by placing the work into the deviantART Resources Gallery you are redistributing the work (i.e. passing it around to other people).

"Crediting" is of no consequence. Neither is "Non Profit" and don't even bring up the trivial alterations which may have been done.

The bottom line here is if something you used came from a stock resources website, you cannot submit it to the deviantART Resources Gallery.

If you do, it will be deleted.

I'll also take the time to point out that far too many of you are relying upon "stock" websites which are little more than huge piles of stolen artwork and photographs chopped up and cut out and offered as "free"

I won't name them specifically but most of them have the word "render" in the website name somewhere.

Once the term "render" applied pretty much to works which were drawn-in by a 3D modeling program, or another work which was created from scratch.

Over the last couple of years though the term "render" has mutated into a slang term which means something like, "Yeah so I found this cool piccy somewhere by somebody so I just grabbed it but didn't like the background very much so I used MSPaint to cut out the super cool thingy in the foreground I wet my pants over and now I'm putting it up here on this website with thousands of other stolen works so people can use it for free.....Oh, and don't steal 'cause I cut it out so it's mine"

There are certain communities here, notably 'signature' and wallpaper makers, who are the most guilty of using these sites and actually believing they are legitimate instead of the filthy pits of art theft they really are.

It doesn't matter if the site hosts thousands of stolen images or has hundreds of thousands of members- if you use the make-believe "stock" from these sites it will be deleted once it comes to the attention of the staff and that's the way it is regardless of how much you sputter about the so-called unfairness of it all.

Find yourself a legitimate resource site plzthksgb.

For crying out loud people stop assuming that search engines like Google or Yahoo or Ask.com are some sort of billion image free resource stock websites.

They are search engines; they help you find things on the Internet, but the vast majority of those things belong to somebody.

For those who might not grasp the meaning of this, they function much like our own little browse pages and search function here on deviantART; while you will get some free resources in the result the vast majority of it is copyrighted artwork which belongs to somebody, and that somebody and a half dozen friends will beat your head in if you just grab it and do whatever you want with it- trust me I've seen it happen.

Just because it's on the internet doesn't mean it's free for the taking people.