Fanart Use Best Practices
Yay a law-related topic…not. Point by point drill-down-ish. Also, citing my comments in your blog is kind of… :# But anyways–read Digitalboy’s rant for some background first, if this is not familiar to you.
Second, I’m going to post a picture by gofu and not cite him…oh wait. (Look at that lol sig. Anyways, have some loli.jpg.) Crap, that’s not exactly citing him but yet it is citing him! I’m in a bind desu ne.
Third, it’s not about law. Law is like, power. It’s like a stick you hit people over the head with. It’s like puffed-up ego. Just because the law may be on your side doesn’t make you less of a jerk, you know what I’m saying? And if you think about it, resorting to legal tactics is something bullies, loan sharks, and ambulance chasers do. Good people live by grace of others and the good will they first deposited in their friends’ lives. Of course, it is not always possible to get by without resorting to your legal rights, but it should be a last resort. We have civil, personal lawsuits because we outlawed duels, so you might consider legal threats the same way as throwing down a pistol match.
It’s not so much about feelings, but it is about feelings. I’m not going to try to explain to you how people feel about their original work that gets copied for other people’s ends. I mean, I run this blog on a CC BY-SA 3.0 license, so I am not in any place to say “oh attribution is w/e.” I would like to see what kind of crazy-man out there would copy my content, even when I don’t really give a damn about scrapers or whatever. It’s like one of those silly shareware licenses where you send a novelty item like beerware or postcardware to fulfill your terms. As you may imagine, you can do some pretty neat things by passing out software, or blog links, or fanart. Sadly when it comes to the Japanese, they’re kind of stuck in their rigid framework and don’t think outside the box much when it comes to “rights” and “feelings.” If you feel butt-hurt because you choose to sit on hard rocks, your feelings are not going to matter very much?
I bring up the OFP, only because I still think it’s dumb even after all these years. It’s a good example of feeling butt-hurt when you don’t have to. I think there may be a consensus that people would credit artists more if they were readily identifiable, that it’s not a hassle. It’s also something a fortified and divided internet by language and culture invariably make more difficult. Drop that us-versus-them mentality. What the OFP people need to do is educate “them” dirty gaijins if they are actually serious about their butt-hurting, and not just tell us “our butts hurt and this is how you hurt our butts.” That’s what all the good NGOs do, right?
Anime blogging, ultimately, is not serious business. This blog discusses some serious things at times, but it is not serious business. I reiterate this because that’s my bottom line about this debate here and here. It’s easy to misunderstand Hinano, but it’s cute and fun that way. And it’s probably not worth our time to try to understand what Wah has to say about this either. And if you do understand the both of them, well more power to you. If not, no big deal. Still, remember it’s not serious business. A lot of anime blogs, or so-called such things, are just image dumps. Imagine a 30-image dump that is mostly fanart and mixed in there are caps and vectors and artbook scans, because the said blogger can’t write to save his or her life. Or you have people like good o’ Super Rats who … well, let’s just say that he should stick to pictures, lol, because it makes me cringe less and the text does the job more than enough as is. Citing the fanart becomes a service, a courtesy.
But it’s a good opportunity to examine the underlying mechanism that explains why CrunchyRoll earns the ire of many, and this is exactly why sites like Sankaku Complex seem so horrible. I would take a step back from harassing image boards in general, because sites like Danbooru are more a service to the community than a way to make money? This depends on the specifics, but some people are paying out of pocket and spending personal time to make the world a better place. I respect the feeling of those who are trying to help, I guess.
With all that said, people do and should express their concerns about inappropriate use of their intellectual property. I think it’s perfectly OK to email someone to ask them to take down a picture or accredit something. Make delicious link love, and make some friends while at it. Just don’t go all paranoid or like a butt-hole when it happens. Yea, you can’t stop everyone, or catch everyone, but what’s the harm? Woo decontextualized images of animu porn wooo? Hurt feelings, man. Put some ice on it.
Being the free-cultured copyleft-leaning guy that I am, however, I think accreditation adds to the possibility of transformative work through free propagation of IP, where as withholding said propagation is never good. There’s a point on the balance where one burdens too much on the other. Better than that decontextualized argument, it’s better to just say that I occasionally get requests to post my OP pic in full, and it’s in those instances where an artist’s pixiv or home page can be handy, to cross-pollinate where one has not sow and introduce someone’s work to someone else, rather than simply have a pretty image on the internet. A win-win situation for everybody methinks, and that’s why it is important to accredit. In fact, I can say that for Danbooru, it’s rather well-cited for an image board of that size. Furthermore, undeniably some most active visitors on sites like those are fans of artists, and accreditation is natural. It’s just like Wah stalking Akiyuki Shinbo. Talk about a trackback! So why piss on those guys? They’re good folks. As good as wanking lolicons can be, at any rate.
So, feel free to ask “source” for my images, because sometimes I do have them and for some reason I neglect to post where they are from.
Right, this is probably the most realistic take on this whole argument, and the one that will hold true when this blows over. But it’s nice to spread word and, as you said, maybe make some friends.
I tend not to use a lot of fanart personally. But then, I also tend not to attribute it at all, primarily because I usually select an image out of a large collection of possibilities and at that point I don’t actually have the artist’s info any more. In some cases I never had that info in the first place. If pixiv wasn’t so annoying and actually remembered my login details I might use it a bit more and that problem would go away, but it, like so many Japanese sites, is extremely clunky. I often get the feeling that Japan’s approach to the internet is stuck in a time warp where it never advances past 1999. Guess I’ll start doing it from now on. When I actually bother to write anything, that is.
[…] list of anime blog posts related to the post are staggering, the least to say. Image credited to bj0rN. Follow his drawings at […]
I’ve read probably more on this debate than I would have cared to at 5-7am. I really have nothing to add that has not been stated 10 times more eloquently by 10 more people. My only regret; besides sleep deprivation, is that among all this butt hurtedness and raeging no one acknowledged probably one of the funniest comments I’ve ever read…which i don’t know how to properly cite…
[On WAH’s Blog]
bpop Says:
“Isn’t fanart violating the rights of the copyright holders? Or is there some legal hole that makes it right to draw, let’s say, some Hachikuji snail guro porn without having to ask permision to Nisioisin, Vofan, Poyoyon Rock…?
Because then there would be some double standards in practice…”
To which WAH responds:
“My point isn’t about legality. I break the law all the time. I just did right now when I downloaded this Shin Mazinger episode. I keep stressing (people clearly can’t read) that’s it’s about R E S P E C T.”
To which bpop responds:
“Well, then, let’s just forget about legal stuff… What kind of respect is there if you don’t ask permission to make your snail porn?”
And then I laugh my ass off for a few minutes.
hahaha TRUTH
[…] Omo’s thoughts […]
The law is a stick that bullies abuse, but it’s also a force that’s there for the defenseless to use when common courtesy has proven not to work, don’t forget.
I agree it’s courteous to attribute, if possible; and to offer to attribute, if you don’t know the origin of the work. Certainly you should be clear that the work isn’t yours (though I think people can be forgiven for assuming everyone would know that the work wasn’t theirs). There’s no point in getting all defensive about it, but also not much point in getting aggressively offended.
Though, I have to admit that I’m a bit startled to learn that this is such a big issue — I’ve had my images propagated two or three times, and have felt flattered when it’s happened.
As you point out in your penultimate paragraph, there’s also another cultural divide at work: the Free Software/Free Culture movement is about sharing. I’m typing this on a computer driven by software that is the product of tens of thousands of people sharing incremental improvements. Sometimes those habits spill out into other areas of culture.
But I especially like your point that attribution is higher-value sharing than mere anonymous reprinting.
And, “What kind of respect is there if you don’t ask permission to make your snail porn?” is an excellent response to some of the argument, as well, and made me laugh. That aspect of the doujinshi culture has always bothered me a great deal, because I do feel that it’s profoundly disrespectful to some of the characters involved. Even if they’re fictitious personalities, the personalities they have are the ones the original creator put there.
I can go on about that (not snail porn). Danbooru is a good example where the artists are still severed from their art even when it is often credited. So it isn’t how big your link is, but how you use it?
I don’t know quite what you mean: severed, how? Pixiv, because of its language opacity, does a pretty good job of severing an artist from their work, too, for those not literate in Japanese.
I often come across an image on Danbooru or Gelbooru that particularly appeals to me and the first thing I do is click on the artist link to see more in that artist’s style (and am disappointed when there’s no artist credited, something that’s becoming less common).
Ironically enough, the first guide to registering for Pixiv I came across was on one of the image-boards, and I do tend to go there first, now that I’ve learned my way around.
[…] reading the statement, I have to identify a bit with omomomomo. It’s silly because it tends to give off the impression, GTFOG. In a perfect function of this […]
There are two kinds of people who surf Danbooru. There is the type of people like you and I, who are just really sampling or browsing. And then there is the people that just mirror everything, or otherwise download things en masse. Danbooru (and sites like it) serves both groups of people.
Pixiv, on the other hand, is really a social networking site first and the image gallery brings the first (you and I) type of people on board, even if we don’t have any pictures to contribute (but we can critique or give stars or be scenesters or whatever). Invariably each piece of artwork on Pixiv is tied to a person, where as on Danbooru the art stands alone and the artist is reduced to a tag, just like “mexican_standoff” or “uncensored” or “Hachiikuji_Mayoi”.
As an aside, that’s one area where danbooru could improve–instead of tags, authorship should go with release format and form pools…or something. Tho, Danbooru is relatively single-minded focusing on the content and not so much the stuff surround it, but that’s exactly where the disconnect occurs.
A better statement or argument is rather–what makes a drawing isn’t who owns what, but the drawing itself.
Maybe this can use a post on its own…
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“Anime blogging, ultimately, is not serious business. ”
This, so so so this. And that’s why I’m like :v over the whole thing at the moment.
[…] is a continuation post on that fanart citation circlejerk, but a tangent that began here (scroll […]