Character Theft

Ugh, god I've had mine stolen before. I've had kids around 13-15 on tumbler steal the artwork of my ocs and then proceed to make rp blogs for them. They even went as so far as to steal the entire background and story for them! On one hand, I'm flattered that people actually think my characters are good enough to steal, but on the other hand, I want to do unspeakible things to the little hellions.

 I've also had kids on tumbler "kin" with my characters and then proceed to think that they were them? They even started an ask blog too. It was hella weird. I politely asked them via pm to please take down their blog, and they told me that and I quote, "You were stealing my identity, so yeah I clearly don't need to do shit. You on the other hand, should be apologizing to me. You stole a part of me, and I just got it back." After telling me that, they blocked me and some of my friends who weren't involved in the situation either. 

I finally got so pissed about it, and with no other options, I contacted a old buddy of mine from 4chan (don't worry, he got off the site for good like me XD), and had him hack their tumbler account and kill the blog. He owed me a lot of favors and a bag of cheetos. Was it morally right to do that? Ehhhhhh nah not really, but I didn't have any other options. ;w;"

ElithianFox to be completely fair, the characters i myself had stolen were just simple humans (but with some pretty distinct features). i don't think the type of character matters, just as long as someone cares for it.

ElithianFox most closed species have masterlists & active artists who encourage their customers to check in before buying/trading for stuff, so it'd actually be much harder to pass off the thievery/sale of a fake cs than some random oc :U (also the ocs i mentioned were stolen included one of my main characters, which is a random elf girl)

Oh man luckily i haven't had characters i've designed/bought stolen except for one time that im still extremely bitter about, but i have had old adopts i've made stolen A LOT

one set was ridiculously popular for theft and got stolen 5-6 times, all in different ways, the weirdest was someone flipped the set, then used a combo of the dodge and burn tools to essentially make them look like melted puffy stickers? it was very bizarre. anywho because of that I have about 3 or so years of adopts stored away because i was sick and tired of people stealing sets and trying to sell them because i was a dumb kid who didn't put watermarks on my stuff under the assumption i wasn't popular enough to get stolen from. 

I've not only had someone attempt to steal These Two before, but that person who tried to claim that they were his ocs also told numerous of his friends he was planning on stealing them. This guy was obsessed with me and even did a makeup cosplay look for the first one of the two. He tried to edit out my watermark of my Large Written Username/Namesake. Then would bring up "old drawings" that he did of them to try and make it seem like I "stole" my own OCs. That I've had for years since I was 10. OCs that I've spent years pouring info into them. That he was aware of that. Like this guy got his friend to harass me for not being interested in being associated with the guy and being uncomfortable around him, then got his friend to harass me even more for "stealing my own ocs."

Eventually the guy fessed up and claimed that he all did it for "ironic purposes" but I knew what he was doing. But... uh yeah that's my being thefted from story.

to chime on the whole "species are stolen more" thing - not true.
not really stealing, but i had one design completely ripped off because i refused the persons trade offers on them several times.
they actually went up to a friend and went "Well since I can't have it,  I'll just make my own", like a child throwing a tantrum over candy.

that design was a regular old cat boy with a feral form. only thing remotely special about him was unique markings and a split bakeneko tail.

my friend now owns this cat boy because of just how disgusting the experience was absolutely tarnished my enjoyment of the design. which then led to me completely scrapping my story.
the person had one of their friends make the rip-off, then another one of their friends blatantly stalked me on TH, and digged thru the complaints topic and found me vaguing about it (the stuff was off-site and i had no clue any of them had a TH until then. rip me.) because it really upset me.....the rip-off maker then contacted me under the guise of "making amends", only to start running circles around me, even at one point saying "I doubt you were ever mlstd." (basically the rip-off maker used to be a friend and I had confided in them about something that happened to me at the time...so they decided to bring it up and say they think I lied about it)

I'm a little paranoid about it, but it's never happened to me before. If anything it worries me that someone has stolen one of my designs and there's the chance that i'll just never know about it. I don't really even know how you would go about finding that sort of thing ;;

vergil That's what I meant with my post! ;v; Non-OS species like humans, elves, mostly human demons, kemonomimis, gijinkas, anything with human skin tones probably make up 90% of all non-beastly humanoid OCs, and are very susceptible to being stolen as they're generally liked by default by a ton of people. Most of my characters don't belong to the most popular species choices and are red skinned babs, which from experience I've noticed not a lot of people are drawn to in the first place. The ones I protect the most are ones that belong to species I see get a ton of love, like humans and furries. That's what I was referring to in my post

kodirge I definitely agree there! CS character theft is prominent, but also harder to go unnoticed thanks to masterlists. I don't have any interest in CS so I haven't seen from up close how prominent theft is there, but I've heard a ton of horror stories about theft and "close referencing", which is basically Theft Light™.

On an unrelated note to the above replies, how do people find out that a character was stolen? Random chance of stimbling across it? Friends telling them it was stolen? The only art I've found reposted was through google reverse image search, but I ain't have the ime to do that with every piece I own

Man this has just reminded me that I basically got accused of stealing/copying once. It was ages ago over on Deviantart, when I was still actively drawing/commissioning art for a Digimon OC of mine. I'd had this really nice commission of his whole evolution line done and a pretty popular Digimon artist saw it and sent me a note basically saying how similar my OC was to theirs and implying that I'd copied without really saying it out loud. I politely responded to them that I'd had my OC for years without any knowledge of theirs, and I had dated files on my laptop to prove as such if they wanted to see. I even ended the message with a smiley face. Their response basically told me not to get so angry about it (when I hadn't come across as angry at all) and they agreed to drop the subject. Made me so mad!

On the flip side I've only had my stuff stolen once. I'd made three MLP adoptables on a base (again, over on Deviantart) which someone took, recoloured in this kind of sepia tone and then sold on another site. They got called out on it a couple times but I don't know if they ever took it down or anything. I was more annoyed for the people who'd already adopted my designs than for myself. Thankfully I've never experienced anyone directly stealing my OCs (though someone did alter the backstory of their character to be an awful lot like one of mine). All you guys who've been stolen from have my utmost sympathies!

as far as i know, i've never had anyone try to steal my characters or art, and i hope it stays that way.

Luckily, I've not had it happen to me, but it's always a fear of mine. I love my characters very much, and it would break my heart to see someone else use them. 

When it comes to my art, I always watermark it, for several reasons. To discourage theft, to present my work as 'professional', and because I really like my watermark. XD

ElithianFox I see! I'm sorry for misinterpreting that somehow. _(:3

To answer your question though, I would usually find out in various ways. I've had a few cases were someone would tell me first, be it a friend or someone that watched me (people working in their mysterious ninja ways). In other cases, again, some of my thieves drew art of my character before, I'd somehow made my way to their pages again and bam, there it was. The most unfortunate case was when I found out nearly a year later. And since back in the day it happened to me a lot more frequently, I would self-google my name. Reposters made character theft easy because it was so much farther away from the original source. So I tried to limit that, especially if they didn't give a link back but eh... ahah