Deviant Art doesn’t understand what public domain means?

Your deviation Pirate Brushes… Yarrr was reported for Art theft or No Permission. The report was reviewed by a member of the Staff and action was taken, deleting the deviation and marking the report as Resolved.

The administrator who deleted your deviation added the following:

Deleted due to Copyright Violation

The work(s) listed below have been removed by staff as a violation of the deviantART copyright policy. Your deviantART submissions must consist entirely of your own work or valid stock resources and must not include works from copyrighted sources.

Please read our Copyright Policy and if you have any questions or believe this removal to be an error please contact the deviantART Help Desk

Title: Pirate Brushes… Yarrr
URL: [link]
Submitted: 2008-09-26 11:35:26 pm

Interesting, since every image in the brush set was sourced from openclipart.org images. The deviation description actually cited the openclipart.org source image URL for every single brush in the set.

Either openclipart.org has pirate-themed images that violate someone’s copyright or Deviant Art doesn’t understand how public domain works…

One of my deviations was deleted. The reason I was given was: “Deleted due to Copyright Violation”

The message I got also said: “Please read our Copyright Policy and if you have any questions or believe this removal to be an error please contact the deviantART Help Desk”

I absolutely believe this deletion was made in error. Every single image used in the deviation was cited back to the source image at openclipart.org right in the description field of the deviation. Now, as I am sure you are fully aware of if you know about openclipart.org, every submission to openclipart.org is submitted under the public domain. We even have folks on openclipart.org who source artwork from illustrations created before 1900 (I think the exact date is 1919, or whenever Steamboat Willie was created) because they fell out of copyright. I am guessing that the administrator in question incorrectly assumed that the two images I included that were sourced in this way were a copyright violation.

I really need more information about which images in the brush in particular were a copyright violation, and why. Worst case, they actually are, and I would like to alert the openclipart.org administrators of this as well since both myself and they are under the impression that they are valid public-domain images. Best case scenario, the admin who deleted my submission was unaware of openclipart.org’s licensing and policies.

The deviation in question was at: http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/99090972/

I really wish it hadn’t been deleted without some warning so I could have copied my list of source images that I posted in the deviation’s description.

I look forward to your prompt response on this matter.

We’ll see what happens.