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by AlienRobot
680 days ago
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The other day I noticed that the only platform where illustrators post that supports CC is DeviantArt, and it doesn't have a way to search for CC work since its redesign years ago. There doesn't seem to be anything like Flickr but for cartoons, clipart, and illustrations. There are free clipart websites, but those are mainly third-party. This means illustrators on Instagram, Twitter, or Tumblr who choose to license their work as CC have no machine-discoverable way to do so. This is a very unfortunate turn of events. It's very easy to find CC photography and music made by someone on the Internet, but it seems almost impossible to find a drawing licensed the same way. When I see an article with an ugly AI-generated cartoon at the top, I can't help but think we could have articles with cool random artwork by real people instead if it was as easy to find freely licensed artwork by living artists as it is to just generate something with AI. It feels like there's a huge hole there that doesn't exist in photography (thanks to Flickr), doesn't exist in video (Youtube lets you tag your videos as CC), doesn't exist in audio (many years ago Newgrounds created an entire audio section just for CC music that could be used in flash games/animation by other users), but somehow exists in illustration. Even in OpenVerse, if I search for "illustration," most results will be historic. I realize that in most cases it doesn't make a difference, but I really wish I could have a URL to link to. I wish I could say "here's this picture, and here's a link to this guy's portfolio, who put this on the internet and let me use it." Is there some method I'm not aware of or is this just how it is? |
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Based on a quick look over the DeviantArt API documentation, it doesn't look like there's a way to get rights statements/licence information for a particular work: https://www.deviantart.com/developers/http/v1/20240701/objec...
As far as I can tell, they don't have any way to programmatically browse their catalogue at all, meaning we couldn't easily include it in Openverse with our current capabilities. However, they don't disallow crawling or search indexing, so if we are eventually able to reimplement that capability (e.g., using CommonCrawl data, if DA is there), it might be possible to search for openly licensed works on DeviantArt in Openverse.
I do wonder why DeviantArt doesn't make this possible themselves though, and whether that's an intentional decision since their redesign. As a stop-gap, you can use "site:deviantart.com" on Google images and enable their CC license filter. As mentioned elsewhere, the lack of granularity in Google's license filter leaves much to be desired.