Breach of trust - Important Patreon updates (Patreon)

What happened?

It was brought to my attention that one of my Patrons has been re-uploading exclusive material to an external piracy site without my permission resulting in leaks which have been going on for a long time. I already found out who they were and took action; I am also in the process of writing a DMCA takedown request to said piracy site to take the stolen material down.

To make this clear just in case it wasn't already obvious enough from the nature of this platform, nobody is allowed to re-upload my Patreon exclusive material anywhere online under any circumstances.

Unfortunately, Patreon wouldn't be able to do much to prevent this from reoccurring, thus I will now deem this platform itself an insecure content outlet. Furthermore, this is happening to many other artists. I don't feel comfortable directly sharing my artworks here anymore.

What will change?

To ensure this breach won’t repeat, from now on I will send you all the material accessible to your tier via email. Measures will be in place to easily track down any leakers.

• Emails will be sent weekly. This arrangement is experimental for      now and could change based on your feedback.
• What I already posted will be kept here.
• Nothing will change regarding the monthly rewards.
• Buyers are allowed to share the files they receive as part of their      commissions.

Please let me know here or through message if you have any question.

Conclusions

I feel incredibly sad and betrayed by what happened and I regret things reaching such a point where I am forced to create this inconvenience to both you and myself, but unfortunately I see no other way of protecting myself against exploitation.
It hurts me even more to know that the party responsible for this copyright theft was a friend of mine from whom I would’ve never expected such a backstab.

I have always been grateful for everything people would do, not just to get something from me, but also to see my creations and support me through my artistic journey. I never expected anyone to be so interested in my own art to support me in such a way.

Thank you so much for being here.