Moderation; it's pretty much the word that defines how I live my personal life and it also, coincidentally enough, describes what I do for deviantART.

Now, deviantART is an artist's community. As $spyed is fond of saying, we're a society of artists and not just some social networking website; what we do here strikes a deeper chord than that and that's a rather important distinction.

Being an artistic society means that we really must keep several things in mind and we have to walk several very fine lines.

For one, and this is the foremost concern, we need to provide a platform which accepts the widest possible range or works and content as possible and we need to embrace as wide of a range of talent as possible.
Now there are certain lines that we have to draw; we prohibit very few things over all and those things that we do prohibit are either flat out legally hazardous, like underage nudity or pornography, or they can produce an unhealthy affect on the community over time, like hate art and self harm.

We also need to make certain that we respect your rights as an artist and that we help you to assert those rights when someone has wronged you, for whatever reason, by taking your work without permission.

I've seen interviews and forums where people representing other 'social networking' or art sites have talked about the problems and issues that they face and, being on the 'inside' here at deviantART, it's immediately obvious to me sometimes that some of these places really don't put too much thought into the best way to respond when an artist claims to have been ripped off.

Most of them simply throw the Digital Millennium Copyright Act basic requirements at you, essentially a form letter which amounts to name, rank and serial number along with a digital signature which needs to be written in a very specific manner most of the time and they leave it at that.

I've also heard first person accounts of at least one of these places telling a photographer that they needed to print the DMCA copyright infringement statement out in hardcopy, sign it and mail it into them via snail mail.

Some places don't respond to you and those that do can sometimes take weeks and often they force you to jump through a lot of legalese hoops in order to get some sort of satisfaction. I've heard the horror stories and I don't doubt their veracity.

So I take a certain amount of pride that we here at deviantART take your concerns so seriously and we try to accommodate you and your concerns about art theft and ripping rather than trying to make you jump through a rigid set of legal hoops devised by politicians and not by artists.

I joined staff on 15 August 2002 as a volunteer in the very department which I manage now.

At the time I joined we handled copyright infringement complaints via email. I remember that time being horrible. Doing this sort of thing purely via email results in an avalanche of email which is messy, time consuming and if you lack the necessary dedication it is easily something which you put off and try to forget about.

Thinking back to those days I can honestly say that I can somewhat understand why some places are slow to respond and fairly cranky about it by the time they do.

After almost two years of handling things by email we received a nice little custom built desk in January of 2004 where every report could come in and get organized a bit. It was little more than a list of links organized in batches of 50 per page but after the hell of email it was an amazing little place to work.

Since that time our community here as evolved and the website itself has evolved, becoming nicer and easier to navigate but in all that time the Reports Desk remained as it was with only a minor tweak or two over the next four years.

Now the CEA department has always had a reputation of running smoothly and efficiently and being something which can be taken for granted because of the fact that we take what we do seriously and we make certain that it gets done. Because we are always there quietly working in the background nobody really put much thought into whether we could do things any better if we had access to something built fresh and clean rather than what we were using for so long.

So when somebody mentioned that Devious Technologies was going to be building an entirely new system from scratch we all took it as an awesome opportunity to widen the gap between us and all these other sites.

So after weeks of input, mock-ups, conference calls and discussion the system launched and I wrote a little announcement which you may or may not have noticed.

One of the biggest things that I like about the new system is the fact they you can see if a deviation has been reported before and when you do report something you get some sort of feedback about what happened or didn't happen.

It all ties in nicely with the education we try to push forward, and hopefully with this new particular feature we can reach out to everyone who reports things and let them know if they're doing it right or it they've managed to absorb an entirely incorrect assumption about our policies.

It's running nicely so far and I'm watching to see how people react to it and use it so if you notice anything, such as journals or threads or some such thing, which you think I may want to read feel free to mention it here.

I'm also open to questions and other forms of feedback about it.