Hot-Linking, Reporting Art Theft and Groups!

STOCK GROUPS: BEWARE OF POLICY VIOLATORS!

As a Founder and/or Co-Founder of Stock Groups, I get dang tired of deviants who are alleged art thieves trying to join who have galleries of "stock" that are screenshots/caps of celebrities, movies, games, comic characters, etc. Not only are such requests denied, the deviants are reported to the help desk! I notify Elandria of the "celeb" stock and she can move it to the scraps and report the deviant directly to the CEA team. The problem is rather huge, so it is important to get the word out.
Report, report, report!

:thumb293032432: CEA Blog: How to communicate with the CEADuring the course of our daily activities we receive a lot of communication from members, in the interests of helping you get the right help in the quickest possible manner we have put together this guide on how to communicate efficiently with the CEA team.
Before contacting the CEA we ask that you do the following:
Check for a relevant +faq entry to make sure your question isn't already addressed there. This can save you a lot of time waiting for a response that you can easily access.
Check recent #communityops blogs to make sure that your issue hasn't been addressed there.
If reporting harassment, have you blocked the deviant and hidden their comments already?
Collect any relevant information about the issue, links to comments, journals or deviations
If the issue has upset you, take a few minutes to make sure you're calm before contacting us. This will help your ticke :thumb285584905:

The sooner such garbage is removed from deviantART, the sooner we can all find legitimate stock to use! Considering there is a limit as to how many stocks will show when doing a search, the celebrity, comic character, movie caps, etc. take up valuable room in the search results. To read more what is doing about the aforementioned, read:

Stock and Resources: Policy ClarificationThe Stock and Resources community is an integral part of deviantART, both for having an active community of its own as well as providing high quality stock to all deviants. 
As this community has grown so much over the years, so has the amount of invalid stock and resources that have been provided by some deviants. The Stock and Resources community feels like this reflects negatively on them, the volunteers have a hard time trying to teach people about valid stock and how to use it correctly, and it gives an appearance that deviantART Staff tolerate so-called “art theft” or copyright infringement.
In this article our aim is to reinforce our policies regarding stock and stock use and clear up some misconceptions.
Stock and Resource submissions to deviantART:
What are Invalid Stock and Resources?
In short, invalid stock or resources are anything which you do not have full permission to upload. This incl

If a group encourages art theft by featuring celebrity screenshots, be sure to report the group to the help desk as well. Groups that inadvertently accept screenshots, or at least turn a blind eye to them, are violating policy but are not in line to be banned

Groups that encourage art theft, however, can and will be banned if $taff construes that the group outright encourages theft. It is time to save bandwidth and unload deviations and possibly groups that violate policy!!

A few important FAQs (taken from a denial message from various groups I admin):