A creator on Patreon was recently “outed” that they were providing not just their own work to paying patrons, but a huge collection of commercial work culled from other creators and publishers that they would send their patrons out to “find” for them through various pirate sites. Even when these documents had clear copyright notices (and a great many did), they claimed that they thought the documents were creative commons releases, public domain, or that redistributing them for personal profit was legitimate “fair use”.
This Patreon campaign was pulled down for all of a few hours until the creator closed access to the massive collection of pirated material. Then it was immediately reinstated.
How far does a creator have to go to betray our trust and to sell our hard work for their own profit before they aren’t allowed back on the platform? How many times do we see threads here of creators complaining that their work is being redistributed on free sites? This is far worse, this is our content being redistributed via Patreon for a profit.
tbh Im very afraid this would happen to me/my art and Im not having means to know if it is happening because:
1- the searching system is not very good (at all)
2- the following system is not more interactive
3- the relationship manager should allow us know more who is following/pratroning us since some just follow/patron us to redistribute/monetize our content that was mean to be vip to some extend???
yeah therea are a lot of old creators here that will give long explanations and advices of what to do, but still its not an intuitive system yet and not everyone has full time to use to do these stuff. For me would mean like wasting 2 hours investigating instead of 2 hours creating. And meanwhile someone is stealing our work.
I trust Patreon team is working on it but its kinda like a big need rn???
I think attempting to monetize another Patreon creator’s work should earn an automatic page removal. There’s no reason for Patreon to be lenient about this sort of piracy.
Hi there, thanks for making this post. We understand that you’re rightfully upset at this creator’s actions and we remove access to copyrighted works. Patreon is all about rehabilitating creators but please know that if this creator continues this behavior, we have a policy in place for removing repeat-infringers.
If you have any further feedback about this matter or anything else concerning our review process, please send it to directly to the legal team and they’d be happy to hear it and answer any questions you may have: legal@patreon.com.