You open the April 2007 Donation Present and grab the following item:

Vesnali Chick Beanbag

FINALLY

So, I just want to put something to rest--- it doesn't matter if Subeta made an item similar to a custom one because when you submit on custom clothing, you're agreeing to a legal contract-- seeing as how on the custom clothing page it says-- verbatum quote: "We may at any time release official items on Subeta that are similar to custom items. Anything you submit, including items based on personal characters, becomes property of Agoge, Incorporated. "

I'm extremely happy to see more natural curls! Thank you so much. I don't think they are "too frizzy" at all, I am sure ppl can tell by now I think the site doesn't have /enough/ natural curly hair styles so I am grateful for each one that's released that isn't just straight hair with a curling iron to the ends. Please also consider releasing more of them outside of CSC options too!

All the items here are gorgeous and lovely. Beautiful art. I... do not have an opinion on the current drama. Feels nice for a change LOL

Wow. I was going to come on and say how the book design is just adorable then saw all this. It's just pixels, this is just a game, why are people so fast to be so hateful. It's really not good for anyone's health to get so worked up over some pixels :(

@RoxyWolf I'm not sure why I got pinged when my first post explicitly said I did not call staff out for stealing. I was merely explaining why people might be upset over the similarities. My second post highlighted artists looking at RELEVANT items in a very easy way. Drawing a hummingbird? Look up the words hummingbird. It's not rocket science. It's called constructive feedback. If people could read posts better, that would be fabulous. This is why I try not to respond. My posts get misconstrued. I'm not a part of this "witch hunt" and don't need a patronizing wall of text directed at me and I certainly do not need angsty messages and snark when my first two posts were anything but. Thank you.

@Rocketlauncher Yeah, I heard it was a tribute item to somebody who had passed away.

@Cream, I agree, I think the Subeta artist one looks better than the CW one, to be honest, and the birdfeeders are different. The birds are not colored the same since they have more color on them. I've seen many CWs that look like they just simply took a wig or a dress from the site and then changed the color of it and charged a lot more for it. I don't think the Subeta team has anything to apologize for, and this has gotten blown out of proportion.

So, so, so, SO excited about the hair items~! I have black curly hair with that exact texture, and unfortunately, I haven't found many items to reflect that! I really hope to see more hair like them <3

@usagi
There are around 50,000 individual wearable items on Subeta, a little less than half of which are CWs. That is well over 20,000 individual custom wearables. The members of staff who vet CWs for addition to the site are not members of the art team, and it's infeasible to expect even them to recall and identify every single item that's been submitted when there's so many of them, let alone the actual artists, who have quotas to meet and spend the majority of their time drawing what they've been assigned to draw and handling their real-world lives outside of Subeta. The artist who drew the much-maligned hummingbird item was assigned to draw, as Rah stated, "a hummingbird feeder with hummingbirds around the HA". They did their job. They literally just did their job, and now they are literally and in no uncertain terms being called a thief and a swindler by the community because their assignment crossed over with someone else's unrelated custom work in terms of concept -- and on top of that, the Staff are being called unprofessional and accused of tone-policing for defending their team members from accusations of plagiarism and theft -- the suggestion being, then, that they should lie down and accept whatever's thrown their way under the guise of "critique", when the majority of these posts haven't been critique in any remote semblance of that word's definition.

As to the number of hummingbirds in the work, which I see brought up a lot -- consider the Principals of Grouping.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_grouping

Likely, there wound up being five hummingbirds because at the end of the day, that's what looked best for the composition, nothing more and nothing less. Fewer birds wouldn't have looked "full" enough, and more would have seemed too cluttered. The artist was literally just following orders, and perhaps the argument could be made that Rah should have checked that a similar item didn't exist on site -- but that's kind of a ridiculous thing to ask of any member of staff,, because the assumption then becomes that this should ALWAYS be done for EVERY proposed concept for ANYTHING added to the site IN ALL CASES -- and once again, there are literally tens of thousands of individual items on this website, and if you try to avoid stepping on everyone's toes by never adding anything another artist has touched upon already, you will have nothing left to add to the site at all. Even fellow CW artists can't escape the trap of being called concept thieves and copycats within their own community, when they actively engage and participate in that sphere -- expecting people who don't pay nearly as much attention to it to know the ins and outs of who's done what is a tall order to assume of anyone.

It is just incredibly wild to me that some users genuinely appear to believe that people are sitting there browsing their work and saying "yeah, could steal that. gonna steal that next! deffo gonna rip that off" when honest to god it's more work to create a passing knock-off of something than to just do your own thing in the first place. Artists have deadlines to meet, they literally don't care what y'all are doing, they're busy trying to find their tablet pen and figure out why that hand looks so wrong; only to blearily realize it has six fingers and none of them are a thumb at 4am after they successfully locate their pen underneath of the cat on the other side of the room, whereupon they shed a single weary tear, and go to make some tea, because it's been 9 hours and they forgot to make dinner because they were not going to rest until they figured out what was wrong with that hand, and time tends to get away from you when you're working -- they are busy with their jobs and their lives, is the point here, and they don't have the time to sit there and follow this entire separate realm of the site, anxiously wringing their hands and cross-checking time and time again before they even open SAI that every single thing they are assigned to create isn't similar to anything else that's ever been on the site (friendly reminder again that different members of staff do different things and the subeta team isn't a single omnipotent hivemind) beyond the occasional limited interested they may have in buying something now and then.

It is unfortunate that two items looked similar at the end of the day, especially since the CW apparently has sentimental value to the creator -- but quite frankly, it's one hell of a conclusion for everyone to jump to that the artist deliberately set out to rip off the CW, as though they had it up in another tab as they drew, rubbing their hands together like an 80's cartoon villain and cackling as they piecemeal their own version of the work solely to steal from the CW creator's design, in a dastardly ploy to......... hurt them because reasons, apparently. Some users are acting as though this is a deliberate attempt to plunder from and harm them, as though they are personally being targeted -- when all that happened is that one artist, drew one item, that had a similar concept to another item, because their boss told them to draw something, and neither one of them had any idea a similar item already existed on the site in the first place.

From what I read offsite, the hummingbird CW is a personal memorial item dedicated to someone.
It's unfortunate that both the CW creator and the staff members are getting very upset over this similarity.

Just because Subeta is within their rights to release a very very similar item does not mean it was wise to do so. I'd think keeping the CW artists that are keeping this site alive happy would be more important than this.

And it is a shame to see the members of staff responding in the manner that they are.

I'm sorry my levelheaded posts are giving you so much angst.

^What you all sound like.
Literally move on, the CW crowd has accepted this for years. Anyone else still shocked about it should read the rules on the site they willingly joined.

Why can't we ever have decent curly hair? It always just looks like frizz...

I'm kind of flabbergasted if the art process doesn't involve looking at current site items relevant to what you're drawing though?
Like artists just randomly think of something without checking what is on site first?
This isn't a thing to prevent cws from getting copied per se BUT really a check on all items on site to see hey do we have X item already? :x
I mean if I were an artist and drawing say ... a fox, I'd wanna know what we have on site already and look up all items with fox in the title (acknowledging some items are named obscurely and might be missed)? Idk. :x /shrugs

Blatant copying... yikes. Low move, staff. Low move. That will be one item I will refuse to get, ever.

Just a PSA but the members of staff that vet Custom Wearables and the art team are completely different people, so LITERALLY the artists never see the majority of CWs that go on this site.

And therefore,

It's not unreasonable at all to consider that the artist who drew Homemade Feeder had no concept that the other wearable existed in the first place. The were assigned a concept by Rah to draw what they drew, and so they drew it -- anything beyond that is coincidental at best.

(Also the reference photo thing, like, artists usually use multiple photos per image -- or at least I do (and usually my own photos,) -- so it's not just a matter of "oh, they both used the same photo," especially not when the birds in each one are in very different places and at different angles, which would necessitate different reference photos to get all the angles right. The CONCEPT (as Rah stated: hummingbirds at a feeder around the HA) is superficially similar, yes, but the execution isn't. No tracing was done here, no recoloring or editing of the other art -- nothing here was stolen, because you cannot steal a concept. If a concept could be stolen Subeta wouldn't exist because Neopets would have sued them into the ground over a decade ago.)

It's not that you can't voice negative opinion, it's that so far the prevailing tone of the dissent has trended to outright accusations of art theft, and that's extremely disrespectful to the staff -- and just as you are allowed to post your opinion that a concept can be stolen, others are allowed to disagree with you, even if you don't care to hear their replies.

Link: http://i65.tinypic.com/awsr9t.jpg

No, sorry. One hundred more excuses can be made about how this ~just happened~ to look similar, and that's fine, there's some logic to it. But the placement of the birds? Four out of five are accidentally in the same position once flipped to the same side? Ehhh.

Umm... yeah, if that was aimed at me, my comment wasn't about/aimed at you... It was more about some other comments here and on similar news arguments. :hushed:

I don't feel attacked or like I'm attacking someone else at all. It's a conversation. doesn't even need a label. It's adults working differences out. It's called grown upping.

@Galaxia
It's all chill !

My sentiments exactly! Thank you. It just seems like people aren't allowed to voice their negative thoughts on this site without being attacked or blamed in some way :(

Ack, @Muerte. Sorry, wasn't trying to speak over you.

@Tomato99

Muerte might mean that the artist working on the monthly collections may not be aware of all or even most of the CWs on-site. Thus they wouldn't know to make their item 'look different' from the otherwise intuitive design choices that Riptide laid out in their comment.

@Tomato99
Do you seriously expect everyone to remember every single item that is on this site ? Every last one of the 28,623 wearables and 22,429 custom wearables ? So you honestly think that, at this point, we haven't done a great majority of styles ? It's also not their jobs to be in the CW world (the artists, that is). Their job is to create content, which they do. If we demand they (as well as CW artists) to stop creating things that are similar to other stuff, almost nothing would be made. Hell, on a near weekly basis someone is being posted about on and off site, and being ripped to shreds because people believe they "stole this design" since, you know, we've done a large amount of things. One of the biggest, continued fights is wigs and them "being the same style done over and over" or how people can't do flats because they're somehow a ripoff of someone else. People draw things that they want, it does not mean they have to pay any form of attention to what others are doing. The staff artists draw ideas that they come up with, or ideas from the suggestion forums.
And what does the process have to do with anything here. She looked at birds and drew birds, she didn't look at a custom wearable to draw an official item (boy would the anatomy be messed up if she had). She didn't know it existed, how was she to know that she had to alter her own design because of an item she didn't know was there.

@meurte I have nothing against you I just find your comment confusing.

How do you expect someone to make something look different from an item they didn't know existed. @meurte

Are you saying that Subeta isn't aware of what exists on their own site before they create a new item?
Isn't that the process for creating new CWs to make sure there are at LEAST 5 differences between items?
And they have to be obvious differences right? Not just subtle ones. If I'm wrong I apologize for not being informed correctly or not reading the cw rules correctly.

I can't spell.

I think it could have been easily solved with "oh we are sorry, we must have used the same reference picture! We have rules for this but we understand you might feel displeased with it"

instead of accusing eachother of things and "you have no right to be angry because"
we are human, we have feeling. There was a hard work behind that CW. And time, no matter arguments.

Let's all respect each other, no matter who has right and who's wrong.

I'm not on anyone's side. But remember - there is a living person behind (hopefully) every screen here.
This discussion is sad.

Sooo I am just going to be honest, I feel like the quality of the hummingbirds as well as style are both way better then the cw version which I forgot even existed until was all omg they copied art and are so wrong...You know what I am glad Rah came in and said what she did, I love the hummingbirds and for once a bunch of complaining whiners are not going to win and I am going to proudly wear them on my HA along with that bg that I am still squeeing over.

How do you expect someone to make something look different from an item they didn't know existed.

It's not hard for me to believe that it's a coincidence at all. I can honestly say that if I had wanted to make hummingbirds and feeder cw, it would like VERY similar to the hummingbird companions cw and the feeder collection item without knowing either of those item exists. I would have had a hanging feeder. I would have 3 or 5 birds. I may have played with the idea of 7 but I'll probably decide that would be too busy. I would not have done 4 or 6 cause I prefer odd prime numbers over even. Hummingbirds would have definitely been green too since that's a common color. Point is, the execution is nothing unique. The only place I can see to add a personal touch is on the feeder itself. The only real thing that would have been shady is if the feeders were the same, but they aren't. Same colored flower is not enough to make them similar or a blatant copy. Everything else seems like pretty common/generic trait to me that easily several people could come up with. The only way I could think of that would make it end up looking significantly different is to use a feeder that you stick in the ground and having the birds lower down and in more varying colors, but that wouldn't be what I want and not be the first thing I think of if I was commissioning this item.

Hummingbirds are not a copyrightable concept, that much is true, but the Homemade Feeder could definitely have been done in a different way so it wouldn't look so blatantly copied. Sorry if the staff feels "insulted" at the accusations of copying, but really… It's not hard to see why people are disappointed in this or why they feel there's copying going on.

For starters, hummingbird feeders come in a lot of different styles. Ex o1, Ex o2, Ex o3, Ex o4, etc. There wouldn't have been anything wrong with something styled more like these, or even using multiple styles to have more than one feeder present. Additionally, while most feeders DO have red flowers, there are some with other colors like this one with yellow flowers. The flower color could have been changed.

Also, I have to agree with McKay, why five birds? You could have had four, two, six, seven, eight… And why are the birds so similarly positioned around the HA? You might have altered the pose of the birds, but the placement still isn't that different from the CW version. Taking a bird or three away could easily let you space them out more around the HA, or adding more birds could lend itself to moving them around the HA more (especially if another feeder had been present).

Poet, Bug, Tomato99, Usagi, and Wik echo my sentiments nicely in their comments. This is much too similar to be a coincidence, and it is pretty damn lazy. And the fact that people are shrugging this off or trying to lash out at users by saying "I guess staff can't make ANYTHING then" is neither helpful nor professional.

@StarShadow The Carnival Shop will get new items at some point. :) We have a list of various shops so we can release things in them (We did just put that one tattoo item there). Summer would be a great time for carnival fun ;)

that's all well and good but why does it have the exact same amount of birds as the CW, as well? just seems really suspect imo. could've easily had 4
and honestly how is saying "they look directly copied" even remotely similar to "nobody else can make a wearable of this subject matter EVER!!"? also "similar" doesn't mean "identical" lol. I just think the CW creator deserves a little apology? (I'm just saying, not even in a malicious way. Please don't ping me back here to argue with me lmao)

Destiny has covered nearly everything I wanted to say, really. My team uses photos and real life for their inspiration and design research - I imagine artists of both hummingbird items have looked at similar reference images and ended with similar drawing results.

We've done a collection based on pollinators, I assigned 'hummingbirds, flying around the human avatar with a feeder' to my artist. It's insulting to my department to insinuate that an artist that's worked here drawing hundreds of original items for many years has suddenly needed to copy an existing CW. Any similarities are purely coincidental.

Since they're releasing more rave stuff in shops I wish they would give the carnival shop some love because I have a ton of carnival tickets but nothing in that shop left that I want.

-- The hummingbird feeder has red flowers on it like most feeders. Just google it...most of them have red. That is because that bright color attracts the bird.
-- The hummingbirds are NOT all green on the collection item. And yes, the green with the ruby throat is the most commonly represented hummingbird.
-- The wings are not the same (in fact they are very different) and the feeder is only the same cause it is hanging...which all hummingbird feeders do...I mean it doesn't even have the same number of flowers.
The art style is not the same and it is not a copy. I think everyone needs to calm down.

oooohhh hummingbirds at a feeder around the avatar what an original concept how dare subeta use it

I get staff can recreate cws and I haven't really minded in many cases in the past because some things are inherently more basic than others like sheer tights or basic heels or a hairstyle.

But this?

I'm sorry but to my eyes the art style looks almost the same. The hummingbirds are the same color. Even the feeder incorporates the same color.
So for a rather more intricate / detailed cw, the entire concept of it down to the colors was used. Not saying this was intentional or not.
Hummingbirds can be many colors but the most commonly represented seems to be green, so sure, I get that.
And that reddish orange flowers attract them. I get that as well.
But this was a fairly more intricately detailed cw and the similarities leave me with a sour taste in my mouth. /shrugs
@Jules you have my sympathies :c

You can say staff is allowed to do this until the cows come home and you would be 100% right.
But this sort of stuff can make people weary of investing in creating cws and even staff has said that's where a good portion of the income of the site comes from. So yeah, bad business practice imo.

You all act like there is only 1 way to draw a hummingbird feeder, like chill

I get that it looks bad, but CW creators KNOW that there could be a similar official item in the future, you check that when you upload. If you don't like that, then don't upload???

& @Wik: @Muerte has been a CW artist for many years before becoming a mini-mod, so of course he knows that his items could be copied by the SubetaTeam potentially, but I really believe that this is good for the users as you get more versions of an item onsite. You could argue that there is a similar afro-CW-wig onsite, but damn do I want more afros!! Even if I were to commission one, I'd still be excited to see more versions of one onsite, just because more people can use it, not like a CW with limited copies.
Same as with the hummingbird. I get that as a creator you might lose some profit, but not like 1000 people bought it anyway as CWs ARE frickin expensive.
So yeah, complain but I don't think this was an ill intent, or intentionally at all. Just google hummingbird feeder.

lol I love that response. The hummingbirds are BLATANTLY copied and the staff response is "oh okay so I guess we can't do ANYTHING EVER"

classy

Hawk Moth... *cough* Transforms *cough* I don't even care I'm calling this a lowkey Miraculous reference.

Okay, so the rules for CWs do say that they become property of Subeta. So... whatever. It still leaves a bad taste in my mouth that this official item is such a blatant copy of the CW. It's also a very lazy thing to do, especially for a collection item - if I'm paying real money for these, I expect more originality and effort than that. Instead, one of the five items here was already sort of on-site. So while I acknowledge it wasn't illegal or anything, I don't respect Subeta for doing that, I have come to really admire and expect creative, original art from Subeta's artists and this is just really disappointing.

I'm in love with everything here nnnng why am I bad at saving money.

I think when they said they have a right to release items that are "similar to custom items", they meant items that just happened to end up looking similar. I don't want to offend anyone, but this doesn't seem like it was accidentally similar at all. :/

the book and the background <3 <3

Aw I want the bee box and the plushie!!! <3

CWs are LICENSED. Your right to make more should be temporarily taken away from you if you really did not agree to the terms and conditions.

Love the collection!!!

Also on the CW thing: The FAQ is pretty clear.

Oh my goddd, i love EVERY SINGLE ITEM IN THIS COLLECTION.

The hair!! The hummingbirds!!! The background!!!

WHYYYY did it have to be CSC ?? ;___;

...
So by this mentality the staff artists aren't allowed to do:
Any form of hair because there's a custom like that.
Backgrounds with mountains.
Fandom items
Bears
Mermaids
Tails
Claws
Most skirts
Most shirts
Flats
High heels
Bandeau
Jackets that move arms
Shirts that move arms
Anything that moves the legs, too, come to think about it
Ears
Eyeshadow
Blushes
Freckles
Glasses
Moustaches
Cats
Dogs
Birds
... Really a lot of things because these are all 100% original things that we created and trademarked.

Want that bumbus queen plushie like NOW, but so many to still get from last years...

I need those hummingbirds ahhhh

@Frenchi
Yeah, same reason I rarely buy/wear dark color wigs, dark colors just usually look black on my monitor and I can't see any of the details/shading.

Wow.
Hummers are SO NOT original at all!
Pretty sad. That's already on site. The original custom is the opposite side. You changed how many things to make it "different"?

aww cute

re: the description of the hive noo don't collect their honey leave them alone lol

Right as you submit your cw to be on the site it says that staff has a right to release similar items.

----------

…That's not even subtle lmao.

I need the humming birds so bad. ;w;

Gotta Get Dat Dough, because while I am personally not a fan of this year's collection, April collections all have things in them that I want.

I'm getting those wigs and then later today I'm getting my spring HA ready. Hells. To. The. Yes.

oh my god the firefly petal charm is gorgeous

the collection's a bee bag
bumblebag

i love this

that background... HNNGGGGG

head over heels in love with and omg

Wooden Bee Box=LOVE <3

@mouse it's probably your computer screen, mine has trouble differentiating between very dark colors and tends to shove them all into "pure black" so they look a little flat to me, too. (and yeah, i've tried adjusting my gamma but all it does is make darks look faded / grayed out, so i just stick with the default. drives me nuts and i have no clue how to fix it!)

@Amber
What ? Me ? Never.

...
What just happened.

im dying dude that afro...i hafta use it...i hafta be the first

Not a fan of the wigs...the styling.....bleh....like the flowers but don't like the way the hair is styled

Other items are fine

HUMMERS :heart:

Aaaa these are downright beautiful!!! :heart: especially that Firefly hair :O

the bg!! ahh I need!

Love the hummingbirds :)

I'll only celebrate the fact that I'm saving CSC this month :v And maybe the hummingbirds. Love them hummers ~

Save the bees!! ^0^

I am so happy about the hummingbirds! =D

@Caterpillar ~ yeah, that's my cw.... I'm not pleased (unsure)
I made a mini version of it

you never hold back @Muerte I'M SURPRISED YOU DIDN'T COME IN WITH A GIF OF SOME SORT

Oh my golly, I am trying so hard not to make a "pollinating" innuendo.

I am in love with both of the hairs. Just. Gimmie. Now.

REALLY PLEASED ABOUT ALL THE BEES


Also pleased for more hummingbirds

Aww this is such a nice collection! ^^ Only complaint I have is that I really can't see any shading or lines on the wigs... the hair part just looks like all one colour. My eyes are bad though so that's probably why. xP

I. LOVE. SPRING.
(I forgot this was happening today and I am in love)

@far queen bea gonna come after you for not being impressed by her beauty

Not impressed but it's nice.
At least there is a MOTH

LOOK, IT'S EVEN GOING BLEP

Too tempting to make a "NOT THE BEES" joke here :P

@Tserel maybe one will pop up this month??

OMG I need that plushie and background n.n

Homemade Feeder looks familiar :/

No joke this is nice.

omg that backdrop is so gorgeous *-*

Pollinators, but no bats? For shame.

(how can you resist their little faces ;; )