Edit: I've just woken up to a night's worth of replies to this journal and people have made a great point about the fact that I could put these deviations in storage until the situation has ended, which I just have. If you are new to the conversation and wonder what kind of deviation we're talking about, they are the same kind of montages seen on that blog: [link]

As you can easily guess from the stats on my profile, I don't post very often. I try to, because it's important to use the website I help build. So when last year, for fun, I made these montages I thought it might make people I'm in touch with on dA laugh, or at least smile at the absurdity of them. And some did. When I submitted them, $chix0r and her team saw that they could be controversial and they were discussed during a meeting with her team. I had submitted the images with default settings, so they made me disable prints immediately. That made total sense to me, I felt stupid for leaving the prints available in the first place, I really didn't intend to sell these, they're just jokes.

I wasn't ignorant of the fact that yes, these images are using copyrighted images. I had read about fair use, parody and satire and considered that they probably fell in the parody category of that. IMHO they're parodies of the original portraits that display these celebrities under their best light. Since I knew that the moderation staff had looked at my submissions, I assumed that even if my understanding of the TOS and the law is limited, they knew it better than I did and their decision to leave it up was because this content was fine to be here. It was probably a mistake for me to not do more digging, more verifying at that time, or even just ask the community.

So I want to apologize to everyone it upset over the last few days that there are montages based on copyrighted images on my profile. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make anyone feel bad about those montages, or the fact that they are still here now. I've talked to $dxd, $chix0r and even +spyed about it, as well as a few deviants interested in the topic of parody fair use and unfortunately so far nobody has a definite answer about whether these deviations could be fair use. I genuinely don't know.

It's a very grey area, but one I think is worth investigating, which is why I left the content up, if only for the time the discussion goes on. If no conclusion is reached and all the experts I'm consulting cannot give me an answer that makes me feel confident about the content being fine to be here, I will take it down without question. But if I took it down as soon as the first person asked for it, there wouldn't be any discussion, and people wouldn't learn about rare cases where it might be OK to use copyrighted work without permission. Even if my deviations themselves turn out not to be one of these extremely rare cases.

I get why people get aggressive when someone breaches TOS or seems to breach TOS, especially if themselves have been the subject of moderation decisions. It's even worse when there's a $ attached to the name of the potential offender.

I also get that it was a dick move on my part to block the people that displayed that anger towards me really early in the incident, I'm sorry about that. I'm not used to having pitchforks directed at me, even less so in a personal manner on my profile and deviations. Which is why my first defense mechanism was to give back some attitude and block a few people. That's a human reaction, in the middle of the weekend, seeing people being aggressive towards me for something that was intended as a joke made me go "WTF? I'm a good guy, I don't deserve to be treated like I'm pure evil or talked to like that, for something I genuinely didn't think was wrong. I'm not going to be a doormat and let people walk on me.". So I've just unblocked everyone, especially now that I've had three days worth of angry people, the replies that I originally found aggressive now look very soft spoken compared to people who stop by on my profile to call me a piece of s**t.

Unlike other staff members who use their profile as part of their job, I'm a software engineer and my profile only contains personal stuff. Very personal sometimes. It's my playground and when the community, pissed at me, came marching into that space it made me feel terrible. Just like that my personal space was gone! A lot of people have told me that I should be a role model, my profile should show people what being a great member of dA should be. Wow, me, a role model for artists? I think that's impossible, I can barely draw stick figures! My understanding of TOS isn't perfect because it's not part of my day job to moderate people according to it. I don't think I can be an example of being a perfect user of the site at all, at least not until I engage with the community more often. And clearly that might involve mistakes in what I post or the way I reply, along the way. I almost need a $ symbol with training wheels on it to show everyone that I might work for the site, I've only been active on it for two years and I have yet to understand everything about the community culture, if one can ever fully understand a community that large and diverse.

During my job I always experience the community drama from a distance, I might skim over critical journals and upset comments, but I'm not the one handling them or responsible for the matters at stake, so I don't engage because I don't want to get in the way of fellow staff members who have to handle that crisis. Now that the drama is directed at me, I now realize how it makes them feel when it happens to them. No matter how much you mean well and you didn't want to upset the community, you might get the pitchforks in full force, it hurts and you have to take it and stay civil about it. I didn't take the insults personally but it kept me up at night, I just couldn't stop thinking about it, thinking about how I could explain my situation better without once again looking like an asshole for just trying to defend the situation I'm in.

For now I'm going with my work as usual, which in the past week involved a lot of bug-fixing on sta.sh as well as building a new feature sta.sh users have been requesting for a while. I'll keep talking to the experts on staff about my deviations and fair use and if by the end of the week there is still a grey area and I still don't know for sure if these deviations are parody fair use and comply to the TOS, I will delete them all and report the findings or lack thereof on my journal.

Anyways, thank you for your understanding and constructive feedback. This has been a great a learning lesson for me to witness first hand. I look forward to using my improved understanding of the community, hopefully for some of my work or to create deviations that won't be controversial!