Proving Sprite Theft

So, you've made some sprites and are very proud of them, show them somewhere online - and after a while, you realize to your horror that some random guy has taken your hard work and claimed it as his. A big mess is made, and the person ends up admitting the theft. You sigh, glad this is over.

But then it strikes you: What if it happens again? What if the person doesn't admit the theft then? What if you can't even prove it at all?

And then you rush to the Cave of Dragonflies because it's got a sprite theft avoidance guide.

Avoiding It Altogether

I'm sorry to say that there is only one foolproof, flawless way to completely avoid sprite theft, which is not to ever show them to anybody on the internet. Of course, most people wouldn't ever just stop showcasing their sprites, so that's out of the picture.

The other most solid way to prevent people from stealing one's art is generally to place some huge watermark on top of it that covers a substantial enough portion of the artwork to prevent it being cut off - but for sprites this is generally untenable; they're usually small, and the crisp aesthetic of pixel art is seriously undermined by putting any kind of translucent watermark on top.

As a result, it's likely your spritework will get lifted and reposted by others eventually. The way to respond depends on what kind of theft you're dealing with.

Dealing With Theft

The Casual Reposters

This category isn't exactly art thieves; they just post or display other people's sprites (or other artwork, for that matter) without stating who made it or otherwise following the artist's usage guidelines. You might even be an artist who doesn't mind people reposting your sprites without credit, and then you can just skip this section.

Most casual reposters are simply kids who don't really know the etiquette around using other people's fanart and think it's fine to just freely put whatever cool pictures they find somewhere in their forum signatures or social media or on their websites. If you tell them to give credit or remove the sprites (depending on whether you would prefer not to have your work displayed at all or just want it clear that it's yours), they will usually say sorry and do so.

What rules individual artists set about usage of their art can vary. The main sorts of possible permission levels you can set are these:

• Free use, where anybody can take the art, repost it anywhere and use it for anything they want, even without credit (though actually claiming free-use art as your own is obviously still lying).
• Give credit, where anybody can take the art, repost it anywhere and use it for anything they want, so long as credit is given to the artist.
• No editing, where it is permitted to repost the art elsewhere with credit, but not to edit it or create derivative works from it.
• Use only with permission, where the art can't be reposted or used for anything without your explicit permission.
• Not to be edited or reposted, where no use of the art by others is permitted at all.

(While it's generally safe to repost art unmodified with clear credit in the form of a link back to the artist's website or social media, it's always best to ask if you don't see the artist say anything about usage - better to be safe than sorry.)

How do you prevent casual reposters from taking your sprites? The good thing about this type of person is that they aren't deliberately taking credit, so simply pointing out that these sprites are yours and you don't want them used without credit will usually be enough. Put your terms of use somewhere in a very clear place, on your profile, at the start of your sprite thread or at the top of your gallery, so as to minimize the chance of them being overlooked; people may still miss them, but it'll make it easier to point to the rules.

Sometimes casual reposters will find sprites using image search engines, believe they are official or that they can be used just like official sprites, and use them in sprite edits of their own. This is especially common for revamps of old sprites and sometimes for scratch sprites or pixel-overs. When this happens, they usually won't even see your terms of use. To prevent this, it's often possible to make your sprites non-searchable by making your art only accessible to logged-in users where posted on third-party sites, or you can add robot commands on your own website to instruct search engines not to index your art.

However, unfortunately not all art thieves are simply casual reposters. We also have the serious ones, the ones who really are trying to take credit for your work.

The Attention Thieves

If you see somebody claiming your work as their own, then if it's on some form of social site where you can report posts for stolen work, the first thing you should do is report it. You can also, if it's a site where anyone can make a public reply to someone's post, publicly respond to call them out. Or, if it's on something like a fansite, you can see if it has some way to contact the webmaster. Don't yell or call the person names; just state that the work is yours and link where you've posted it before. If you're lucky, the art thief will just be some kid desperate for attention and admiration, and they'll immediately cop to it and remove your work. Then that's usually the end of it, since your average kid who wants positive attention for creating some art they stole will slink away when caught.

However, not everybody is that fortunate. Sometimes thieves will double down...

"You stole it from me!"

This excuse can easily be disproved if you posted your sprites immediately after making them on any kind of third-party website or social media application where content is timestamped. If you can show an older timestamp than they can, it's fairly obvious you're the creator. For this reason, it's a good idea to always post your art somewhere that has a timestamp immediately after making it.

If the person still claims to have made it before that, or if you don't have a clear third-party timestamp for when you first posted it, you could have a problem.

Which Sprite Is Stolen?

If you haven't taken any security measures for your sprites, you may have to get into the weeds to prove which sprite was stolen.

Proving who stole a sprite, whether you're a moderator of an argument about this or an artist defending your own work, can be tedious. However, one thing to remember about art thieves is that they are never as good as the actual artist of the work they stole. This simplifies the problem enormously. For example, "artist" A almost certainly stole from artist B if:

• A is known to have stolen art before
• A has never made any other sprites by request or commission, while B has
• A's other sprites have obvious basic flaws not in the stolen sprite, such as forgetting the outline when recoloring, removing the shading, or using the default Paint color palette
• A's other sprites are completely different in style (often stolen from another artist)
• A's sprite is saved as a .jpg and has compression artifacts, while B's sprite is saved as a clear .gif or .png without artifacts
• A's sprite has artifacts from being resized
• A's sprite has some part colored differently from B's sprite, but the outline is still the same
• A's sprite is a splice that appears to have been made from B's sprite

"It's just a coincidence!"

Especially for splices and revamps, the thief may just say they happened to make it exactly the same as yours. For more complicated splices or revamps where you have made scratch edits to the shading, you should still be able to argue it can't be a coincidence: point out some of the ways they're an exact match where a different artist working independently would probably not have placed the pixels exactly the same way.

Nonetheless, if the sprite really is simple enough that someone else might have made the same thing by coincidence - such as if it's just a Pokémon recolored with colors taken from another Pokémon, with no scratch edits - then you honestly can't prove it as yours, and in fact, maybe it isn't yours after all. You don't own the idea of coloring that Pokémon with that color, after all!

Security Measures

If you want to be sure to recognize your sprites, as I mentioned, sprites are very hard to watermark in the way other artwork can be; the watermark or signature would either be pretty easy to erase or cover up significant portions of it. However, there is nonetheless a way to implement a watermark of a kind for sprite edits specifically.

The key to that kind of watermarking is making subtle scratch edits to some of your official base sprites. If you do, the art thief will most likely not notice it when stealing the sprite, but it will be visible on closer inspection. You can, for example, go over the outline and remove any "dots" of manual anti-aliasing on the outside of the outline, which will make the sprite look a bit better on dark backgrounds as a bonus, or you can subtly change a few pixels of the shading as long as it still looks good. When you see a sprite of yours stolen, check if your scratch edits are there; if they are, then it's definitely yours. Ask the thief what sprites they made it from, and afterwards you can point out the differences and show your edit, proving that their story is at the very least not quite accurate.

When revamping old sprites, of course, you should always tweak the shading and outlining anyway, and if you did, that always makes your revamp virtually guaranteed unique.

Page last modified December 9 2025 at 13:10 UTC

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