Post by ahmwma in Wigglypaint

Viewing post in Wigglypaint

Sorry to get heavy in this thread but I have been looking into the fake Wigglypaint websites and I don't think there's any reason to make up stories about them being run by good-intentioned teenagers or people who "accidentally recreated Wigglypaint with an LLM" or whatever.

The sites are often deceptive about who is running them: sometimes claiming to be IJ, sometimes just the "Wigglypaint Team".
They aren't using an accidentally similar program, it's usually either Wigglypaint 1.3 or Wigglypaint 1.5 with IJ's title screen credit removed.
Many of them are monetized with ads, subscriptions, apps and referral links to AI services.
The vast majority of them stole artwork for their "community galleries". One has even used stolen artwork for their promotional screenshots in the app stores.

And there's a lot of stolen artwork. Overwhelmingly it was taken without permission from artists posting their work here on itch.io. If you posted a drawing on the wigglypaint page here on itch between December 2023 and September 2025 your doodle may have been scraped into one of these galleries. This includes some of our own Decker community folks and even bigger names around the site like Leafo and Kenney.

You can see the write-up here. (It's not perfect, it was written to be a broad collection of evidence and a summary of the issues for affected artists. )

Or this spreadsheet of known stolen artwork connected back to the artist's itch.io display names.

This covers: Wigglypaint.com, Wigglypaint.net, Wigglypaint.org, Wigglypaint.io (a.k.a. Jigglypaint.com and the Jigglypaint app), Wigglypaint.run, Wigglypaint.fun, Wigglypaint.art, Wigglypaint.co, Wigglypaint.online, Wiggly-paint.com and Wigglypaintgif.com.

There are others too, but without art theft or noteworthy lies they didn't make it into the writeup. Most of these sites appeared within a short period of time in mid-2025 when Wigglypaint had a spike of popularity on social media.

And I hope it's obvious (because this is the Decker forum) that the problem here isn't with modding Wigglypaint or taking it apart or learning from it. I've been helping people mod the program off and on and I will continue doing so as long as there's interest. Customizing the program for yourself is fun and easy to do.

The problem is people using a free program to run scams. Ripping off artists while using stolen work as the advertisements to lure them in.

boukew5 days ago(-2)

Yeah sorry I feel kinda bad about posting it. I can delete the comment if you want.

With this great effort and research though, wouldn't you have a mechanism in mind that would prevent this misuse?

For fonts the open source license equivalent is SIL Open Font License (OFL), which has a clause which prevents the "reuse" of the "Reserved Font Name". If we would translate this to Wigglypaint it would mean none of these sites are allowed to use the "wigglypaint" name in their brand. These includes many applications you documented. Technically this is probably already the case in some countries, but I think it is not explicitly stated in the MIT license.

Another license BSD-3 for example has a clause to provide some protection:

> 3. Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

ahmwma5 days ago(+3)

For the record this has been in progress for a while. I just saw your comment when I came back here to add the findings to the thread. Thank you for at least looking at things.

The research was actually the simple part. The great effort was in getting confirmations from large amount of artists that they didn't give permission for their art to be used. But I think that it was necessary to avoid a different kind of pedant commentary -- the "Well, are you sure the art was used without permission? Couldn't the people behind the sites have contacted these specific artists?" kind of nitpicking. And now I've spoken to enough artists whose work was taken to be very sure about the scale of art theft.

But in any case I'm not the developer of Wigglypaint and have no sway over the license. I'm just an artist and community member who noticed that the creative works of people here on itch being were used as materials to scam people elsewhere and I really didn't like that.

Screwtapello4 days ago(+4)

To be clear, things like the OFL’s “Reserved Font Name” or the GPL’s “must distribute source code” clause don’t actually do anything to prevent abuse like this. They just give you (in this case, IJ) the legal right to sue people who do break those rules, which means preventing abuse depends on IJ having the time and money to hire lawyers to do the suing, and investigators to figure out who needs to be sued, and possibly more lawyers to figure out which of those people live in countries where international treaties allow them to be sued from whatever country IJ lives in.

Without all that additional stuff, those clauses just amount to saying “don’t be a jerk” in fancier language, which.. I think was already implied.

boukew4 days ago(+1)(-2)

Suing is very rare. Before that people send a email to the site owner simply stating that they are not complying with the license. Then they usually already feel the heat. Like if they had to change the domain name to something else then wigglypaint, then they cannot ride on the visibility wigglypaint already has . They would start with zero-visibility, which for low-effort clones, means many of them will get way less traction. For this approach it helps to have it explicitly stated in the license to quote it.