Hola Guildies. 

I've been a member of site moderation, on and off, for around two years now. During that time I've seen this issue come up a few times, and each time there's a quick and simple solution; problem is there's always lingering questions. The issue in question? "Stolen" art. That is art posted online that winds up on a CS, or an OOC thread/IntCheck thread. 

So here's a hypothetical on how these situations go down from my experience, and I've been involved in three cases of it so far:
[list]

[*] Person claiming to be artist behind piece of art used on a CS from a RP thread posted 2-3 years ago shows up. Claims to have PMed the person behind the CS, usually doesn't get a response--after a few years that no response isn't really a shock. Then contacts site staff demanding we remove the image. 
[*] We ask for proof they're the artist behind the image. They provide it. 
[*] We delete the post in question.[/list]

So this naturally raises a few questions. 

Should we have a policy for this? We want to help out an artist who has legal claim to a work of art, but at the same time we don't want artists harassing members. Odds are the member didn't "steal" anything, odds are they found the image on Pinterest, or Tumblr, etc, etc. So far deleting the post with the offending image has been an easy solution because the posts have always been so old. What if it's a new post? Obviously we'd contact the member with the image in their CS and ask for it's removal, or should we? What if they say no? Should we edit their posts ourselves?

Any thoughts? Any questions you think are important to consider? Let us know. 

Thanks!