Our Mission
1. About us.
We are a small group of artists who, for many years, have been creating digital content. Our dream was to work independently, as our own bosses, with all the freedoms that brings. We wanted to work on our own projects. All this began long before the word "crowdfunding" became widely known.
We started simply, doing a lot of the business end manually. This took a lot of time and effort, which we would have preferred to spend drawing. As our work evolved, so did the methods and tools we've used to grow and keep pace. We perfected these tools as our projects became more popular. But, as many artists are, we were faced with theft from those not willing to support us, or using their access to our projects to take more than was owed (after all, there's a difference between doing a project for a client who is funding it and having our project supported by donation and available for viewing to those who pay a share).
Under repeated threats, and loss of content, we began to invent and invest in protection solutions and, in the past few years, we have perfected these methods. After many tests and research, we found success. Regardless of any attempts by a thief to hide the traces of his crime - we always know who the thief is through state-of-the-art digital security. This allows us to flag content theft and take action against users breaching our T.o.S - no more impunity, our mission statement from day one.
2. Inevitable Punishment.
We looked back on our path to secure systems and thought: why not help other artists? Why wait for other artists to have to learn these techniques the hard way, when we can change the market and provide protection and new life for an artist's projects?
Our thinking was simple: why stick to direct order commissions because security and safety makes personal projects like comics not financially viable?
Our hope was to work for ourselves, on the projects we wanted, and our thoughts are that more artists would start their own projects if they had guarantees of security for their personal investments: their creative spirit and financial incentives protected!
We consider it our mission to revive the digital content and graphic novel market for solo artists and small studios. With the opportunity to protect their work, the market is more viable. We believe that even solo projects are no less worthy of this than large companies that can afford to take legal action or are financially secure despite theft.
Early in the life of a project, we've found that long-form content is vulnerable to theft as the biggest killer of building crowd funding momentum. After all, if content is being leaked online, supporters are less likely to crowdfund a project with their own money. A lone artist or small boutique company might not have the resources and time to pursue a thief legally, especially if the thief is in another country, and this is complicated by being unable to determine who the thief is out of a pool of supporters - the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing.
This is the reality for many artists, forced to work for larger business or only take commissions to protect their financial interests from thieves they can't identify or expel. It's where we started from, and now our solutions are here as a website to host protected content for others!
With our state-of-the-art content protection we are confident in our tracking methods. Changing file format, compressing, gradients, textures, filters and other image distortion techniques do not protect a thieves anonymity. Even photographs of a screen or printed versions can't confuse our tracking methods.
There is no way to protect anonymity for a thief in an audience receiving files through our server. This is a new era - where your honest work can't be stolen with freedom from repercussions.
* Of course it is worth noting that the protection offered by us is not a guarantee against any thefts. This is not a guarantee that you will never be attacked, though our service is a significant deterrent. This is a guarantee that, after theft, you will always know exactly who stole from you with 100% accuracy. All thieves are permanently barred from using our service over all project portfolios and, depending on the severity, no thief can hide in their anonymity from legal repercussions.
3. Business Politics Vs Artist Policies.
Most of existing distribution platforms care very little about artists. In pursuit of profit, many platforms do not protect the interests of the artist at all: ignore complaints and taking no steps to protect your work or act against theft. In their eyes, if they are getting paid, and putting the content online, then it's free for anyone to do anything with after that.
Why?
In their greed, they quickly noticed a simple fact: whether the image is posted by the artist, or stolen and posted by a thief, the image is still out there with reference to the artist's page on their site. For the platform there is no difference in who generates or spreads content with their business logo regardless of if it bring earnest payments from honest supporters to those producing the content. If an artist has to leave? Well, there'll always be more artists and every page or picture linking to a crowdfunding site will bring clients.
A platform like that is interested in one thing - its own popularity. After all, the return on their investments depends on the growth rate of their popularity. Instead of a focus on quality, such a platform counts on quantity, and this means no one artist's business or complaints hold any weight. The value of your work, and the funding needed for hours of work on a project, are not a factor.
In our opinion, this is not a business model based on fairness. The digital security and content protection needs of artists who are trying to build a livelihood should be high priority, rather than a focus on minimal effort and maximum profit. In the eyes of such businesses, their job is to create a platform site and their focus is on increasing server size to take more clients and not on what changes could be made to protect current clients.
At PIXarmor, we are artists first, who fully understand the work needs of our colleagues. Our mission is to change the market, create different rules that benefit the artists, and not to create a quick hosting scheme preying on those who need crowdfunding. We aim to enable artists to receive money for their hard work and shine a light on content theft in an increasingly digital world. Our goal is to implement our services, expand the team, improve our techniques and continue our goals of digital security and legal repercussions. What you see here is just a small seed of a large tree. Our plans are huge, our possibilities are limited only by our patience and your support. The more of us - the stronger we are! 4. Freedom of Content.
The vast majority of platforms discriminate against 18+ (adult) content. Sometimes this is hypocrisy or convenience and, sometimes, it's a legitimate legislative restrictions from the jurisdiction of certain countries. We recognize the pragmatic calculations for any complications with this kind of entertainment media: though most processing companies want a 10-15% mark-up to directly process payments for this type of content or do not serve such content at all.
We plan to provide our artists with the most simple and understandable conditions: minimum rules, maximum freedom. This means that you can freely publish a wide range of 18+ content without fear of us closing your account or any negative reaction from our admins. LGBTQ+, hentai, furry or fetish content will all be allowed. In fact, our content rule is simple: adult content featuring pornography with children is barred. All adult content featuring adults is allowed.
Details of these boundaries can be complicated by international guidelines, so other limitations are possible and outside of our personal opinions on the subject of what art content may be produced. In the case of such problems, we will inform you of additional content limits. We will always strive for maximum creative freedom for you and will do our best to ensure that you can create the content that you and your sponsors want! A rating limit might apply to accounts for those who are not old enough to view such content, but we strive to make all content access convenient for both the consumer and the artist within the letter of the law.
5. The More of us - the Stronger we are! With thieves lacking anonymity, we plan to create a platform that will allow the artist to make a decision on how tough they want to be on theft.
Our plans are to build a platform with a common blacklist. This means that if someone robs one of our artists they will never be able to return to our platform to steal again. For artists wanting the strictest filtering, we are able to prevent a thief from returning under a different name or bank account using identity recognition.
We intend to offer artists an identity recognition initiative featuring security-tested users. Of course, not all of the potential buyers will be willing to sign up to such methods (a five minute form) but it will be possible for artists to choose only to accept users who have registered for this method. We're confident that as our platform grows and more artists and content is hosted here, supporters would be more willing to go through identity recognition methods as a gateway to your content.
In the interest of laying the foundations for these security methods, artists willing to blaze the trail of these additional security measures will be offered our security packages at a reduced rate in comparison to clients who come later or wish to switch business packages with us at a later date. This, to, is a part of our business ethic: rewarding those willing to set the standards and come to our service, in trust, to invest in our business growth.
As a path to digital content security, we plan to work towards financing legal actions against pirates across all countries globally. In the event that the legislation of any country does not protect the rights of the artist - we can provide you with an access filter and at the touch of a button countries willing to shelter content theft can be added to a blacklist and barred access to your project. Depending on the availability of legal repercussions, a premium or insurance deposit may be enforced, at each artist's choice, for clients from insecure locations.
Of course, a wait-and-see attitude is something that can be hard to avoid when trying to innovate digital security. This, too, is a case of building a client-base. The more artists willing to host their projects here, the more attractive our service becomes and the more customer buy-in we hope for. The more of us - the stronger our service, the more appealing our selection, the more cross-advertising for clients and the more threat a blacklisting is to anyone hoping to steal content.
6. Restrictions
Using our platform, you should not:
- conduct lotteries.
- host gambling.
- conduct the explicit or indirect sale of tangible goods. (Digital content only!)
- advertise, sell or direct to the sale of drugs, banned substances, weapons, medical/health supplements, lotteries, chemicals and gambling.
- publish child pornography or a picture that falls under this definition on grounds of apparent age or otherwise..
Violation of one or more restricted contents will result in instant blocking of your account, and all contact details can, and will, be transferred to law enforcement bodies if they show interest to your person.
In all other cases? You're more than welcome here, let our expertise and community grow your business and protect your income!
>>> How do I join? (Some technical details)
* Currently we are in the alpha test stage and can't accept everyone at once to test our server. But we are looking to open to a few dozen artist projects currently. When making a decision we choose from such factors as:
- the level of your drawing skills.
- your desire for full-time drawing and time to dedicate to your project.
- the presence of a story line in your project.
- the number of submissions in your gallery and your experience and client base.
Using the box below, provide us with some information about yourself as well as a link to any existing art galleries. If you're chosen to be one of our alpha testers, you'll receive an invite from us via return email! Other inquiries will be sent an invitation to be a beta tester a little later, when we are ready to scale up our servers. We will definitely get in touch with everyone - just some a little earlier as we move through testing the server load!