The Gist
A certain nail artist, who regularly posts nail art video tutorials on YouTube have repeatedly used my nail art designs. She never asked for my permission nor gave credit. I reported one of the videos wherein she recreated one of my nail designs to YouTube and it has been made unavailable a few days after. Her followers have been leaving comments on my channels ever since. These messages have encouraged me to write this article.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcCRXZK6qIU
The Story
Let me start by saying that I was one of her followers when I started blogging about nail art. She uses only nail polishes on all her nail art tutorials and I admire her for that. I use acrylic paints because basically, they are more forgiving. I also appreciate the time and effort she puts into her videos because we all know that they are more helpful compared to just looking at pictures.
But as I got to know more nail/art bloggers, I started to notice that most of what she recreates on her YouTube channel is not really hers. And the sad thing is, I never saw her give credit nor mention where she got her inspiration from.
I did a video nail art tutorial last December 2011 that I titled, "Christmas Tree ala Polka Dots" and this is one of the photos of this nail art that I published on my blog:
I also made a video tutorial that I uploaded on my YouTube channel on December 05, 2011:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4c4k1uG5e4
The photos and the video went live here on my blog last December 06, 2011. You can read the full post here.
On November 2013, this certain YouTuber/nail artist posted a Christmas video nail art tutorial and she included my "Christmas Tree ala Polka Dots" without credit. I didn't report this then because I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt that perhaps we coincidentally had the same idea! Besides, it was Christmas.
Below is a screenshot I took of her video, showing that she used my nail design:
Let's go back to February 2013. I posted a Valentine's inspired nail art that I named, "Planted Hearts" and this is how it looked:
Planted Hearts Nail Art
Thanks to a follower who alerted me, the same YouTuber/nail artist posted a Valentine's video nail art tutorial on January 2014 and again used one of my designs.
Here is a screen capture of that video she made, showing that she copied my nail art:
I thought twice before reporting the video to YouTube. But I have been experiencing having my designs or photos stolen that it has become difficult to ignore. Stealing is wrong. We (nail art bloggers) all belong to the nail/art community and the least we can give to one another is respect. Let us give credit to where credit is due. We owe it to our followers/readers to be responsible and honest.
A few hours after YouTube made the video unavailable, I received an email from the one managing her YouTube channel. He said:
" As far as your "Planted Heart" nail art design, you own the rights to any images and video your produce of your design, but the not design itself. [She] did not use any of your images in her video and therefore this claim is unwarranted.
Copyright is NOT limited to just images or videos. The design itself is protected by copyright law. Even though she didn't use any of my photos on her video, she still used my nail designs. That is copyright infringement.
I hope that this article will shed light to why her video went down. I simply had to do what was right.
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UPDATE (inserted on January 29, 2014)
I decided to upload a short video on my YouTube channel as an answer to people who have been leaving comments there. Hopefully, I can direct them to this post so that they could read in detail about the issue at hand.
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