Seren🌙 (Commissions Closed) retweetledi
There's this baker in a city who spends years perfecting his craft. One day, he makes a cake so beautiful and delicious, that people can't stop talking about it!! They tell their friends about the baker, line up at his shop, and some even commission cakes of their own because they loved his work that much.
Then, one day, someone steals the cake.
Not just once, either. They take it to faraway villages, cut it into slices, and hand it out to strangers. People there fall in love with it too. They ask where it came from, who made it, where they can buy more.
But instead of pointing to the baker, the thief says, "Stay with me. I'll bring you more."
So the people praise the thief for being generous. They thank him for "sharing" the cake. Some even start following him just to see what cake he'll bring next.
Meanwhile, back at the bakery, the actual baker watches fewer customers walk through the door of his little bakeshop.
He tries putting his name on the box, even on the fondant. The thief tears it off everytime.
He tries decorating the cake in ways people will recognize. The thief crops those parts out too, even recolouring them sometimes.
The baker still wakes up early every morning to make something new, pouring time, effort, money, and care into every single piece. But now his work travels the world with somebody else standing beside it, collecting the attention, the praise, and the audience that should have led back to him.
And the worst part is that many people consuming the cake don't even realize a theft happened.
"Credits aren't important."
"It's just sharing."
"At least more people get to see it!!"
"Don't display it if you don't want to see it get taken by someone else!"
But exposure does not pay the baker's bills. Exposure does not replace stolen recognition. Exposure does not give back the opportunities lost when people no longer know where the work truly came from.
If you genuinely love an artist's work, the least you can do is make sure people know who created it. Ask permission when needed. Keep credits intact. Link back to the original source. Artists aren't content machines, and their work is not free for people to strip apart and redistribute for clout.
Stop reposting art without permission and credits.
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