...and let me tell ya why! (FYI: "Right-clicking" is when you right-click with your mouse to save a graphic to your hard drive.)
You really have to think of it from the designer's point of view. Taking someone's graphic without permission is really stealing the designer's time and money. Since I know a lot of you just don't design your own graphics, let me take you through the process of customizing a graphic so it looks like a whole new pony.
First thing on the list is the purchases you must make. The first item to be bought is the original picture. Some people (myself included) spend a lot of money buying original My Little Pony backcards, inserts, pamphlets, posters, books, comics, party plates, and board games to use for our websites. Those backcards and inserts are the sorts of things that people used to throw away, which drives their value up. A lot of times, the rarer the source, the rarer the pictures inside! Once you've found just the right picture (which can sometimes take a while), you have to scan it in. If you don't know, scanners start at around $100. Of course, I could go to a library to do my scanning, but I spend hours on this stuff and no librarian would let me be for that long! I chose to pay for the convenience of working from home. The next things I pay for are the programs I use to clean up the picture. I use Adobe Photoshop, which costs around $150. I also use Macromedia's Fireworks and Dreamweaver, which adds up to another $150 - $200. Granted I could download a freeware program off the Internet, but these programs work best for me. That puts my total sunk costs at somewhere around $400.
Next comes the hours spent on actually scanning in and editing the picture for the website. It took me a long time to figure out how to make my scanner work its best. I have to scan my pictures all in at 300 dpi, which takes a couple of minutes. I then import the picture into whatever program I'm using (say Photoshop). I have to reduce the dpi to 72 for the web, which takes Photoshop a little bit of time (hey, bits of time add up!). I auto-adjust the color and fiddle with the orientation sometimes. Then comes the harder part - getting rid of the original background so I can put the pony on my background and have it look nice. I use a tool called the "Magic Wand" that selects portions of color that are similar. I then use a "Clear" command to get rid of that selected bit of color. If it sounds tedious, it is. It's also more complicated than that, but you get the idea. If I actually want to change the pony's symbol, hair or body color - that's another half hour or more of getting the paint bucket, eraser, paintbrush and pencil tools to work in harmony.
I know you may have clicked over to this rant from the F.A.Q. section and may be wondering how some of what I've mentioned above applies to the new pony graphics I use on my site. Frankly, I got so tired of hearing about how people hated or couldn't work around my right-click protect script that I got rid of it. I figure most of the graphics I use to advertise other people's sites I just right-clicked myself, so they're just as safe here. I also decided that because the graphics from the Friendship Gardens CD-ROM are computer generated that they'd be easier for me to edit for the web (which they are). I still had to buy the CD, I still had to buy the scanner and software, and I still put hours into turning Ivy into Lips.
The bottom line is this: Unless you give people credit right next to the graphic (or elsewhere if they ask you to), don't right-click and take pics. If someone specifically asks that you don't take their graphics (like me), then don't!
