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Post by jombra on Jun 28, 2012 1:19:39 GMT
Jombra > that's a bit disingenuous, while some people have made money with fannarts of GC, to my knowledge none of those people have claimed to be the original author of these characters, it was still clearly presented as fannart, but payed-for fannart. I perfectly understand that both things get disapproved, but I also think they are not strictly equivalent and should not be equated. I don't think I present them as equivalent, do I? "Make sure you don't claim it as your own" was just a footnote to the 'fanart is okay' message. It has really nothing to do with the other two sections, and none of this is supposed to be a direct jab at anyone, just a clear explanation of what is and isn't okay. It's not okay to do fanart and then claim it as your own characters, I'm not saying it's happened with GKC, just that it's not okay... so I don't really see where your problem is, haha. Edit: Ooooh, I think I see what you were aiming at. When fanartist-Joe says "Here is my original drawing of my world-famous boXXXbot?" did you think she was claiming boxbot the character as her own? Cause she wasn't, I was just implying that the fanart got world-famous, and she was just claiming to be the person who drew it and had the original drawing (exaggerating to be funny). Fanartist-Joe is a parody of me and it's kind of weird referring to her in third person hahaha. |
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skydv
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Post by skydv on Jun 28, 2012 4:00:05 GMT
I was following this whole thing on twitter and every time Kaze replied I felt like banging my head against a wall. I have met people like this in real life and its so frustrating to talk to them when they aren't willing to listen anything you say. I think Tom really handled the whole situation well, much better than I would have. [Watterson is not a good example though: the courts actually ruled that unofficial Calvin & Hobbes derived products were legal because there was a deliberate lack of official ones. Though maybe the law has changed since then?] Oh I have never heard of a ruling like that before. That sounds really odd especially considering that Watterson is still alive. What year was this and what court? |
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Post by King Mir on Jun 28, 2012 5:07:58 GMT
Just in case anybody was still unclear, this is the message you should be taking away from this thread.It's amazing how much this needs to be repeated in order for people to understand. HERE:  Since this comic is technically fanart, the only right I have is to say who can use it, except Tom can use it even without my permission because it involves his intellectual property. (Neopets does this all the time with beauty contest entries and comics.) But it's a silly comic, so you can all use it! This looked great until the last part where is equated selling derivative works with selling a neighbors car. Both are wrong, but they aren't equal, and I feel making that overstatement undermines the point. Selling art featuring Tom's characters does not deprive him of a car. It deprives him of potential profit, and can harm the image of the brand. Furthermore, it is not a crime to violate Tom's copyright to his work, but it is a crime to steal and sell your neighbor's car. The violation is not near as severe. You can't go to jail for wronging someone; you're only expected to make it up to them (usually with cash). In fact if you insist on a legal argument, instead of a moral one, then for a copy violation to be legitimate, it has to be damaging to Tom or the brand. It could be argued that commissioned porn of Tom's would not harm Tom, because it's not depriving Tom of profit (since he doesn't do porn commissions) or harms the brand (because creating porn of something does not harm the original and because some porn already exists). So legally the issue is not clear cut. Now morally, I would still say that selling GC porn is a jerk thing to do. |
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Post by exuberancium on Jun 28, 2012 5:33:02 GMT
Actually, violating copyright IS illegal regardless of its effect on the owner. At least by default. Certain jurisdictions can actually reduce the terms of the base copyright (wat), which is pretty stupid since the Internet doesn't HAVE a jurisdiction. Where the infringer comes from should be irrelevant. EDIT: Maybe it's actually the copyright holder's citizenship that matters, not the infringer's. I'm not sure, and googling it just gives contradicting statements  New Theory: nobody actually knows how to handle copyright so they just kind of wing it? Sometimes I get the feeling that lawmakers are computer illiterate. |
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Post by King Mir on Jun 28, 2012 6:09:02 GMT
Actually, violating copyright IS illegal regardless of its effect on the owner. At least by default. Certain jurisdictions can actually reduce the terms of the base copyright (wat), which is pretty stupid since the Internet doesn't HAVE a jurisdiction. Where the infringer comes from should be irrelevant. EDIT: Maybe it's actually the copyright holder's citizenship that matters, not the infringer's. I'm not sure, and googling it just gives contradicting statements New Theory: nobody actually knows how to handle copyright so they just kind of wing it? Sometimes I get the feeling that lawmakers are computer illiterate. It's not criminal, which was my first point. It's a technical distinction, but an important one. As to using copyrighted works without harming the owner, in principle a copyright violation is a tort, and a tort requires a loss or harm to be brought before a court. If someone's doing something that doesn't harm you, you have no right to demand their money. However, in the case of registered copyrights, the law is particularly favorable to copyright owners. As for jurisdiction of copyright laws, yeah it's all messed up by the internet. But I disagree with you, where the infringer comes from should make all the difference. The infringer's government, which is hopefully democratic and ultimately acting under the authority of the infringer as part of his society, should be the only ones who can hold the infringer in the wrong. A country has no authority to decide what is wrong or right to do outside it's territory, by a foreign national. |
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Post by GK Sierra on Jun 28, 2012 6:11:23 GMT
Actually, violating copyright IS illegal regardless of its effect on the owner. At least by default. Certain jurisdictions can actually reduce the terms of the base copyright (wat), which is pretty stupid since the Internet doesn't HAVE a jurisdiction. Where the infringer comes from should be irrelevant. EDIT: Maybe it's actually the copyright holder's citizenship that matters, not the infringer's. I'm not sure, and googling it just gives contradicting statements New Theory: nobody actually knows how to handle copyright so they just kind of wing it? Sometimes I get the feeling that lawmakers are computer illiterate. Yeah, the human race hasn't rewritten its law books to properly handle the digital age quite yet. The people with big money, the record studios, the music producers, the big name artists, and the movie industry all have the money and lawyers on speed dial get first dibs on enforcement. The private citizen will rarely be able to pursue a course of action like that. |
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Post by descoladavirus on Jun 28, 2012 8:04:45 GMT
Since this comic is technically fanart, the only right I have is to say who can use it, except Tom can use it even without my permission because it involves his intellectual property. (Neopets does this all the time with beauty contest entries and comics.) But it's a silly comic, so you can all use it! Lovely fanart, but if I may make a suggestion for future drawings of Mr. Siddell more...angst in the face. Like he wants to do something, maybe punch someone maybe rip his hair out, but doesn't know what. More Spiders. hanging off hair, hands. etc. |
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Post by legion on Jun 28, 2012 13:23:35 GMT
Edit: Ooooh, I think I see what you were aiming at. When fanartist-Joe says "Here is my original drawing of my world-famous boXXXbot?" did you think she was claiming boxbot the character as her own? Cause she wasn't, I was just implying that the fanart got world-famous, and she was just claiming to be the person who drew it and had the original drawing (exaggerating to be funny). Oh yeah, that was I meant, and ah, yeah, I see, thanks for clearing up the confusion! |
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Post by Bob, Squirrel King on Jun 28, 2012 16:54:55 GMT
It's amazing how stupid some people are.
A point that no one has brought up yet: You aren't allowed to make money from writing fanfiction without permission from the creator of the universe/characters (Star Wars comes to mind), so why would you be able to make money from fanart? There is no real difference beyond the medium.
In any case, whether or not it's a commonly tolerated practice, if the creator specifically tells you not to use their work in that way, you've got to be a real piece of work to keep doing it anyway.
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Post by jombra on Jun 29, 2012 4:52:20 GMT
That's clearly not Tom. I see a hand. Lovely fanart, but if I may make a suggestion for future drawings of Mr. Siddell more...angst in the face. Like he wants to do something, maybe punch someone maybe rip his hair out, but doesn't know what. More Spiders. hanging off hair, hands. etc. SO TO RECTIFY MY MISTAKES I PRESENT:  I don't even know where my mind went with this. I put it on the fanart thread, but I'll put it here to. |
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Post by warrl on Jun 29, 2012 21:26:58 GMT
Sometimes I get the feeling that lawmakers are computer illiterate. The bulk of the world's copyright law - case law as well as legislation - was written (or relies on precedents written) when EVERYONE, no exceptions, was computer illiterate. |
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mcmuffinking
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Post by mcmuffinking on Jul 1, 2012 0:25:09 GMT
Jombra? Your comics are just slaying me right now, awesome!
If I understood more about copyright law I would weigh in, but it seems reasonable to me that you don't make bread off another man's labour.
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Post by GK Sierra on Jul 1, 2012 4:12:40 GMT
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Post by legion on Jul 1, 2012 7:09:54 GMT
They put this add on French dvds too... which is stupid because in French law piracy is not considered theft, but counterfeit (which makes a lot more sense (and is actually punished harsherly than theft)). |
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Post by King Mir on Jul 3, 2012 15:08:40 GMT
Trademark violation is counterfeit. For copyright though, it doesn't make sense to call something counterfeit where no one is claiming to be the original author of the work.
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Post by atteSmythe on Jul 3, 2012 15:14:49 GMT
Trademark violation is counterfeit. For copyright though, it doesn't make sense to call something counterfeit where no one is claiming to be the original author of the work. I don't think you need the claim of authorship consider it counterfeiting. Currency is a great example - what you counterfeit isn't the ownership, but the right to produce that item. Regardless of the legal technicalities, it's a much better fit than comparing it to theft. Both are at least intangible property crimes. |
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Post by King Mir on Jul 3, 2012 15:24:01 GMT
But counterfeit money is still passing off a fake in place of the original. That's where the moral issue is. If you were to counterfeit money just to prove that you could, without then intending to pass the money off as legitimate, then there is no moral wrong committed. A copyright violation is not a fake.
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Post by atteSmythe on Jul 3, 2012 17:00:27 GMT
I thought we were discussing legal wrongs. I'm not opening that can of moral worms!
It seems to me that the big difference between counterfeiting and many forms of copyright infringement is that usually both parties are aware of the fake in the latter, but not the former.
Copyright violation frequently looks eerily similar. Ripping a DVD, burning a new one, and selling it is creating a fake. Ok, but that's the easy case.
Copy a bunch of short stories, republish them in an unauthorized anthology, and sell it. That's creating a fake, right? Even though there's new content in the form of the editorial decisions, and maybe a foreword, etc. Ah, but they're still whole works being copied.
What about taking elements from those stories - popular characters, locations, situations - and create a new story from them. Don't satirize or critique, don't change names or descriptions, just create a new story to fill in the blanks from the original. Publish and sell that.
It's definitely getting further away from counterfeiting, and it's definitely the area copyright law, but it follows the argument much more closely than theft or any other area of the law I can think of. IMO, it's easy to consider copyright infringement a specialized sort of counterfeiting that doesn't create a replica of the entire original, just parts of it.
And in any case, a much easier comparison to make than 'you wouldn't download a car.' Theft involves the injured party losing something tangible. Intellectual Property is intangible by definition.
Ah well. I think it's a nice reframing of the problem, and I'm going to keep it in consideration, myself.
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Post by Eversist on Jul 5, 2012 2:37:38 GMT
This is done (there's an entire tumblr blog devoted to Twilight fanfiction that's had the names and locations changed, and published into eBooks [or in the case of 50 Shades of Grey, etc., real books]). It's totally illegal, so I have no idea how people get away with it.
/aside
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notacat
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Post by notacat on Jul 5, 2012 13:56:38 GMT
This is done (there's an entire tumblr blog devoted to Twilight fanfiction that's had the names and locations changed, and published into eBooks [or in the case of 50 Shades of Grey, etc., real books]). It's totally illegal, so I have no idea how people get away with it. /aside One question that occurs to me in connection with the 50 Shades of Whatever debacle is whether anybody would have known had she not already "published" them as Twilight fan-fiction? (Never mind how much of a fuss might have been made if she hadn't been so allegedly obnoxious about it.) I haven't read any of them, just a bunch of articles about how heinous her crime is and how badly she's managing to commit it, and neither have I actually read any of the Twilight books (I recall stumbling across them before they were published, back when my major fandom was still Buffy and making a mental note to read them when they turned up, which I then forgot  ). I am therefore somewhat in the dark as to how obvious it would be that the 50 Shades books were derived from Twilight without that link. To contribute vaguely towards what purports to be this thread's main thread of discussion, if you take some elements of one or more stories and use them to spark your own, at what point does it stop being "derivative" and start being "inspired"? |
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Post by Dvandaemon on Jul 11, 2012 14:58:13 GMT
Uh...guys? I think we're pretty much done here. The fact of the matter is that it skirts the line in bizarre and confusing ways and it's disrespectful to stay there. Kaze is a jerk, Tom is not saying to stop doing fanart etc...
Get it straight
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Post by King Mir on Jul 11, 2012 18:00:50 GMT
I thought we were discussing legal wrongs. I'm not opening that can of moral worms! I think it's relevant because the whole point of comparing intellectual property law to physical wrongs like counterfeit and theft is to establish it's moral legitimacy. If the moral justification for those types of law isn't the same, then the analogy is useless. Exactly. It's not counterfeit to cell reproductions of great works of art unless you claim your work to be the original. Only if you claim that your copy is an officially licensed product. |
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Post by diztrakted on Jul 12, 2012 21:20:04 GMT
Uh...guys? I think we're pretty much done here. The fact of the matter is that it skirts the line in bizarre and confusing ways and it's disrespectful to stay there. Kaze is a jerk, Tom is not saying to stop doing fanart etc... Get it straight Eh, I'm learning a lot! We all agree on Tom's stance and the law's stance on selling fan material without authorization, but there's other implications in said laws that merit discussion. |
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wheat
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Post by wheat on Jul 12, 2012 23:03:54 GMT
It's become "accepted" because this is what you see on Tumblr and DeviantArt; talented artists who don't want to put the effort into creating their own properties, so they take something that already exists and sell it. The amount of work is not the issue here, it's the fact that they are selling something that was never theirs in the first place. I was thinking the same thing before I read this; if I were selling stuff and someone started selling my work I would only go against them after a quick look at their history of commissions. If they did mostly original work, I'd be fine with it. But if they are a hack who only does commissions of other things, I'd try to get them lawpunished somehow because I like to expose frauds for who they are. Call it a journalism sense. That made me think: what would be a fair workaround for this sort of thing? Would it be okay if someone asked someone to make a commission for them under a certain condition? For instance: a person wants a derivative work and pays another artist to draw them something. They get an original commission work of the person's request of equal or greater quality for the money, and the derivative commission is included free as a bonus with it. Technically, they would be paying for the original commission (so long as it met quality standards of the price being paid for that--no two-second scribbles). I would be okay with that sort of commission work, since it forces people to be original. How about other people here? (an aside: while drawing of Certain Things are not struck down by copyright law, it's illegal under child porn laws so if someone wanted to take action against it, the person doing that would face criminal - not civil - prosecution) |
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Post by legion on Jul 13, 2012 1:38:42 GMT
(an aside: while drawing of Certain Things are not struck down by copyright law, it's illegal under child porn laws so if someone wanted to take action against it, the person doing that would face criminal - not civil - prosecution) It's illegal in certain countries, fuzzy in others and perfectly legal in yet others. And suing criminally someone who did nothing but make a drawing is kind of a dick move. |
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wheat
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Post by wheat on Jul 13, 2012 2:46:14 GMT
Civil is suing between one plaintiff vs. a defendant who has been accused of wronging a plaintiff somehow and the plaintiff wants stuff back to make up for it; criminal is state vs. a defendant for a defendant allegedly breaking a law that detriments society. When I said civil, I meant in the sense that, if the person doesn't comply with the request to take a thing down or not do a thing infringing on intellectual property, they'll almost always get fined as opposed to facing jail time. So unless it got notorious and damaged the reputation of an original work it probably wouldn't be taken as a civil case for any reason other than intellectual property theft. (What nubbins I know copyright law are American; I don't know British or whatever other than what I've heard about the Leveson inquiry, where it's been mentioned that libel laws in Britain favor litigation) edit: Oh, oh, I just remembered what it's called. Civil court laws are called tort laws. It's a funny word, tort and also better is the name of someone who breaches a tort: a tortfeasor. |
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Post by legion on Jul 13, 2012 13:48:57 GMT
Yes, I know the difference between civil and criminal, which is why I made the post which you haven't actually answered to.
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wheat
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Post by wheat on Jul 13, 2012 20:45:15 GMT
Where's the question/what am I supposed to be answering? I don't understand.
My post was addressing the phrase "suing someone criminally;" you can't sue criminally, you have to turn someone in to authorities for prosecution which is indeed a total dick move unless it has affected you in some significant way
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Post by King Mir on Jul 14, 2012 2:07:48 GMT
Also if you turn someone over to authorities, said authorities still have to decide to prosecute or not. It's always their call, regardless of the victim's preference.
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Post by csj on Jul 14, 2012 12:05:27 GMT
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New Theory: nobody actually knows how to handle copyright so they just kind of wing it?
). I am therefore somewhat in the dark as to how obvious it would be that the 50 Shades books were derived from Twilight without that link.
