@LemonDrop
How is the world of coding comparable to the world of art? You don’t gain inspiration from a page of code and then create your own thing based on that, you note down the methods used and then
adapt that code to your own project to make it function or make it more efficient. Compared to that, we don’t take someone’s picture without consent and then trace over it to create a better picture, we take a glance at it and then draw our own version of the same idea, from the ground up. Copying and then adapting code has been the norm in the coding world for ages now, whereas tracing is still seen as a bad thing to this day.
Also, a programmer posts their code online for the explicit purpose of helping less skilled programmers, but I don’t post my artwork to serve as tutorials—that would technically count as a misuse of my art, but it’s not like anyone would ever throw a fit over something like that; it’s only if someone directly traced over it or made some kind of unwanted edit that that sort of use becomes objectionable.
An artist’s creations are not automatically open-source just because you think they should be, and a company, even a shitty one, still has the right to keep their code to themselves. Just because some hacker posts a half-finished game online for everyone to download, that does not mean the gaming company does not own that game, just like how when I post art on this site, that does not mean I do not own it.
Derpi can “use” my art for its own purposes, such as displaying it on things like the 3-day top scoring or featured box, or inside of a user’s watch feed. Users can “use” my art by sorting into galleries or linking to and from it during discussion. None of that implies they or the site own it. A gaming company has every right to be angry when a leak happens. I see zero reason why the misuse of someone’s creations shouldn’t warrant the same response.