People can't be arsed to make up their own characters so they take other people's.

Eeew.. Gross :|

Shina clones !? these people who did this are unclean.... PURIFY THEM !!! *bolter shots*

nah more seriously.... i don't even know how to deal with those people unless contact the moderators and give proof that they copy you (would be easy, but might take time) people are lazy asses and don't even want to be original, a friend have the same problem, but it's like spam, you can't stop anonymous people from putting letters in your mailbox, and don't worry about a deep thinking why they copy your character , either they like it and by that mean they will identify themselves as the character, or the character is as you said "popular" and it could mean people behind that are just attention whores.

purge the heretics for the God Emperor!


sorry i just couldn't resist :P

kill the heretics.

People find character images they like, they fantasise about it, then they want to live their fantasies with it cause theyre horny => thats basically the reasoning behind it. They dont care about originality!

CLONE BEHBIES

Speaking of clones, I adapted my character's new hairstyle from yours.

The first thing that popped into my head was a bunch of storm trooper Shinas.

people desperate for attention and popularity = clones.

"He has a nice fully fleshed character with plenty of art drawn of ... MINE!"
I seriously want to see someone try to pretend to own one of my characters without someone noticing.

It comes down to laziness.

They want to be popular but don't want to go through the work of actually creating a popular character.

I've had this happen a couple times now. Glad to have people who are willing to let me know about them. :o

"Lol and Sigh."

But really you could pull a Strype and put any character in a "Help, someone is stealing me for RP" shirt like that was done for Icee some time back. Yet, this rant alone is a wave in the water.

its it cause the character is known so these people feel cool

Was quite annoyed that I saw a slideshow with one of my raccoon characters in it. I mean jeez, is it hard to ask people or something? Kinda ticks me off.

Forgot to mention furryz.net was the website. But yeah, the very first part of that 3-part slideshow had this character into mind. Seriously, what the hell?

im glad im so unpopular and have shit art that no one would dare steal it.
though, its the fear of getting better that i have to watch out for now that art thieves stealing my non unique characters.

Chances are they are goggling either characteristics of Shena. Although I was hoping it had to do with brawl...

Lack of popularity leads to people looking for popular characters to mimic. They found yours, and want to mimic. "But wait, there's awesome art already of this character, and it's named already? And the name is ON the pic? Damn.. well.. guess I'll name them the same." BAM. Character stolen. Part of being popular dude :p

As much as I'd love to see multiple Shina's this is definitely not the way. Needs less posers. More kage bunshin no jutsu. :v
Serious note though I hope you can get this stuff resolved Daigo. S'no fun dealing with theft of any nature. Period.

Yeah this sort of shit sucks. I have had to deal with it for years. Being impersonated online on various places, second life, even running into another oersin at a con using my character, getting art, and wearing my cinbadge they printed out.

Unfortunately it's not something that's ever going to really stop. There's stolen images for characters left and right on f-list in particular. Having a profile picture makes it easier to visualize a character and makes it more likely for someone to get a partner. They probably just pick a character that's something like what they want and roll with it. The joke here is that somehow on a site dedicated to text roleplay people are somehow too lazy to read a profile page.

I've never seen a flat out character impersonation (yet). Nor do I think any of this is really all that forgivable. Art theft is art theft, no matter what. I'm big on reminding people to source art if they really have to use it. Then there's the whole matter if someone's even okay with using pictures as reference. The most responsible thing they really could to is link a picture to the original post on whatever website it was published on, so it leads directly to the artist, instead of uploading it to their own profile. "here's something like what my character would look like.

But hey, maybe it's too much effort and these people are just a bunch of lazy tards who can't be bothered to source or actually think they're going to get away with flat out taking somebody else's ideas for any amount of time. In which, jokes on them.

I agree with the general gist of your rant though, making characters isn't /that/ hard. It takes some brain power sure, but it's not exactly impossible. (but then I have tons of fun making characters so I guess I'm weird or something) Taking someone else's characters creates nothing but problems for moderators and artists all around.

Not sure there's a way to stop people from being jerks and posers. Unless you can convince them to act better, there's probably no way to stop it. Just gotta get those you can and hope the rest can't do enough damage, or prove themselves unfit to mimic the character.

*shrugs* Humanity sucks, but at least we have some awesome people to balance it out.

Cause quality of the art and people don't want to pay for shit and own it themselves

I've had someone take my art, edit it in GIMP/Photoshop (AKA ruin it entirely) and claim on F-List that it was U.S. law that they could do that with my art.