Recently a fellow deviant =ArtOfDecay-Stock accused my friend and business partner Reuven Cohen (~ruv) of using her stock without giving proper attribution. She called him up on the phone out of the blue while he was traveling on business in Boston and accused him of being a thief. She threatened legal action and to report the perceived copyright infringement to our ISP if we did not remove the design for ArtPolitic.org.

Understandably Reuven didn't take very kindly to being called a thief, especially considering the fact that all the stock materials he used to design the AP site he scanned himself. Since the center of the dispute was my site, Reuven forwarded me along her contact information and I sent her a polite email asking her to detail the copyright infringement so that we could aimiably resolve the situation.

The first response I received from her was polite, professional and she thanked me for getting in touch with her. She also took the submissions in question out of storage so I could compare the textures against what was used to create the AP site.

After carefully comparing her stock against the textures Reuven used for the AP site I could not find a single identifying marker that verified the claim that he's used her work. The textures are similar in that they are both weathered paper but that is where the similarity ends.

At this point I decided to do a little digging as Reuven had mentioned that he had prior art proving the originality of his work. Sure enough when I checked both of her accounts I saw that she had only been a member of DA since 2006 and that the two pieces she claimed he had stolen were submitted in August of this Year. Reuven has been a member of the site since 2002 and he had actually submitted his ArtPolitic design as a deviation in 2003.

Case closed or so I thought until I read her blog entry (which has since been removed) which slandered both ArtPolitic and Reuven. Since I couldn't very well let this libel stand, I responded to her blog post requesting a retraction and an apology. Her response, before deleting the journal entry, was to mark my comment as spam and telling me to learn to read as I had not noticed her tiny little paragraph above saying she had in fact been in the wrong.

In any case, I consider this all resolved now as the journal post slandering my friend has been removed but for god's sake, if you're going to accuse someone of stealing your work at least take the time to verify your claim and have some concrete proof to back it up.