Let's do an experiment. Let's forget that Spaminator deals with exploitation and instead let's do something creative. Let's look at some art.
I drew this picture of my friend while she was waiting for the bus.
It was pretty difficult to draw her like that without her noticing but I managed to get a sketch in between the 53 and 67 express routes. We were trying to get to the Starbucks on 5th street. Long wait for the bus that just didn't show up.
I was practicing my expressionist classical technique using a charcoal 2B pencil and my hemp paper sketchbook.
Cool story right? Wrong.
There is no friend, there is no bus, and there is definitely no sketch.
This 'art' is traced. It took 5 minutes (timed) to trace and complete. 5 minutes.
Here is the original, kindly donated by @midlet, the real artist, for this experiment.
The heist went something like this: log in to Instagram, find suitable art to trace. About a minute of searching.
The original took a couple of hours to produce by a talented artist.
The fake took 5 minutes by someone who knows enough to make "sketch" marks with a pencil.
The person who traced this didn't have a sketch book but they did have a random pencil and a piece of computer paper. They also had a computer monitor to trace through. The style is different. Good luck tracking the original down. But it's still a 5 minute trace.
Meanwhile, the original artist, Midlet, has 17-18 years of professional art education and experience. That's almost two decades. The original art is real. The traced art is as fake as the story.
Hive is unfortunately full of art theft. Often, its in the open. Even more often, its excused. Next time you curate a tracer, stop and think of the real artist and remember, theft of art is plagiarism. And plagiarism is fraud.