Dale Williams was some guy who had a site with a bunch of ripped off work from various artists some years ago, it was kinda comical really as his "portfolio" contained hundreds if images of wildly varied styles, both 2D and 3D (many of them were instantly recognizable) and his software profficiency and skill set list contained every package you could imagine and even programming in various languages.

There was a digital witch hunt for him on cgtalk, it got way out of control as people started posting his phone number and address. Some people thought he was some 16 year old kid who made a mistake, some thought he was setup, some got really nasty about it as the person went through some trouble to remove watermarks and such. In his case the theft was obvious because of the sheer volume and the fact that he included the really popular renders of the day, but it seemed to have made some of the underexposed artists freak out a bit and post their work around various sites to create records, which is understandable. So sometimes he's referenced when work gets jacked.