Copyright

The following stems from (but is not directed at) a previous conversation on this forum. The earlier conversation isn't really a copyright question so much as it was a disagreement between two individuals, but the views expressed when copyright was actually called into question were absolutely appalling.

As a content creator and holder of multiple copyrights for multiple types of work, I feel the need to remind everyone at TOTJO that:

1. You do not own the rights to anything you did not create.
2. That includes usage rights. You can't just use something because you enjoy it. Usage rights must be acquired from the copyright holder or you are in violation of their copyright.
3. That also includes display rights. Displaying a piece of artwork (visual, musical, or written) without crediting the artist is blatantly and flagrantly in defiance of the spirit of copyright, which ensures that credit and royalties from that work make their way to the artist.
4. "Found it on the Internet" is never an excuse for copyright infringement. Ever. Someone, somewhere made it. The Internet isn't some kind of artistic Skynet, just belching out memes and weird videos. If you found it on the Internet, you can damn well use the Internet to find out who created it.
5. Copyright is not a f***ing joke. You are actively screwing with peoples' income and legacy. I literally make all my income right now from royalties off one of my works while I'm trying to finish five more, and if people started posting pieces of that online and devaluing the collection I'm selling that contains it, that literally impacts my ability to eat food on a regular basis. Not only that, when it's done without credit, nobody knows where to buy the rest of that collection if they like it, so I lose even more money.

Copyright infringement is totally not a joke. Don't f*** with artists. We get a little angry.

To further Steamboat's point, which I completely agree with, there is a way to find content via online searches that you are allowed to legally reuse.

When you use Google, there is a button in the navigation menu that reads "Search Tools". Click it, and it will open a menu that contains a selection called "Usage Rights". If you select "Labeled For Reuse", you can be confident that you have permission to use it for whatever you wish. If it does not appear in this resorted search, you should assume that someone owns it and it is not okay to use it with out "expressed written consent".

That being said, I realize that 99% of the world ignores this option and "right-click saves" or screen shots whatever they please. This is a violation of copyright, regardless of how convenient it may be to do.

You should also know that using Google Images, an owner of an image can search where else that image appears online. If they find it on a page you are responsible for, they can ask you to remove it, file a cease & desist order, and/or potentially sue you for using it.

How does this effect reposting a meme on facebook?

As an artist myself I personally don't care if people reuse my stuff so long as they don't claim it as their own....give credit where credit is due...

RyuJin wrote: As an artist myself I personally don't care if people reuse my stuff so long as they don't claim it as their own....give credit where credit is due...

Personally, I'm a fan of just releasing my art and music into the public domain myself (though I do need to get around to fixing the license on my soundcloud profile to public domain). With culture locked up by law for possibly hundreds of years the way it is currently, we end up with a society where our own culture is dictated to us rather than us dictating our culture. It's the reason we weren't allowed to have any real discussion on popular music in my music appreciation classes - even though they were all gazillionaires (or dead) at that point, the works of Elvis Presley and The Beatles were not in the curriculum. Even my professor wasn't pleased with that.

RyuJin wrote: As an artist myself I personally don't care if people reuse my stuff so long as they don't claim it as their own....give credit where credit is due...

Depends on what I'm making and why. A piece of artwork for people to enjoy? Sure, just give me credit and let me know where you're using it. That's why I have a DeviantArt page. Something I'm trying to make money off of? Well that's a bit different. Something I made for myself to represent my own identity? Nope, mine.

I don't think the majority of people understand what goes into the creative. I wonder if people who thieve these things understand they're stealing a part of someone's soul.

edit
i dont entirely agree with this

respectfully, you guys didnt invent the internet

youre allowed to get into it and youre allowed to use it to promote yourself and i agree that you should be

but you have no more say over what it IS than anyone else

there are many and many different artists out there

the sad reality is that corporate influence wins out over free expression pretty much always

i do belive that people should be allowed to make a living off of their art, IF it is good enough that people are happy to pay for it

and i support developing a structure to allow that to happen

but as far as many people are concerned "some kind of artistic skynet just belching out memes and weird videos" is EXACTLY what the internet is AND WHAT IT SHOULD BE

i want to be clear on my postition - again, i do support the artistic control and marketability

but only up to a point

in your case steamboat i dont know what your exact situation is - but use and display are areas that i would basically disagree with you on

if an artist is credited and the use is not commercial then thats all that matters as far as im concerned - even crediting the artist in some cases i think is not necessarily mandatory in a non commercial setting so long as no one is pretending to be the original creator

id be willing to concede to that limitation though, but to me thats about it - i dont think its acceptable to use someone elses work for monetary gain, and taking credit for something you didnt do is punishable by exposure to herpes, but if you post a clever limerick in a public online setting it belongs to the internets from then on

Kamizu wrote:

RyuJin wrote: As an artist myself I personally don't care if people reuse my stuff so long as they don't claim it as their own....give credit where credit is due...

Depends on what I'm making and why. A piece of artwork for people to enjoy? Sure, just give me credit and let me know where you're using it. That's why I have a DeviantArt page. Something I'm trying to make money off of? Well that's a bit different. Something I made for myself to represent my own identity? Nope, mine.

I don't think the majority of people understand what goes into the creative. I wonder if people who thieve these things understand they're stealing a part of someone's soul.

I do have to admit I would be quite upset if someone used my sigil...

CryojenX wrote:

Kamizu wrote:

RyuJin wrote: As an artist myself I personally don't care if people reuse my stuff so long as they don't claim it as their own....give credit where credit is due...

Depends on what I'm making and why. A piece of artwork for people to enjoy? Sure, just give me credit and let me know where you're using it. That's why I have a DeviantArt page. Something I'm trying to make money off of? Well that's a bit different. Something I made for myself to represent my own identity? Nope, mine.

I don't think the majority of people understand what goes into the creative. I wonder if people who thieve these things understand they're stealing a part of someone's soul.

I do have to admit I would be quite upset if someone used my sigil...

and i can understand that too - the question to me is "where is the line between private ownership and public domain?"

i dont want to seem as if i dont respect artists rights

but imo copyrights is an area that can get out of hand

im not really sure where exactlythe balance point should be but im not nearly as strict in my expectations as many others

RyuJin wrote: As an artist myself I personally don't care if people reuse my stuff so long as they don't claim it as their own....give credit where credit is due...

And, since it's your art, you get to determine the license under which others are allowed to use it. You can copyright it, release it under creative commons or some kind of copyleft scheme, or you can release it into the public domain.

But if it's not your art, you don't get to make any of those decisions, as you're not even legally allowed to display it without permission from the license the creator or licenseholder has given. In fact, even if you're not making any money off it, it's still illegal.

OB1Shinobi wrote: in your case steamboat i dont know what your exact situation is - but use and display are areas that i would basically disagree with you on

if an artist is credited and the use is not commercial then thats all that matters as far as im concerned

U.S. copyright law, U.S. judges, and a literal army of lawyers nationwide, don't give two f***s about what you think matters. They care about what the law says. Which is that use and display are rights held by the copyright holder unless otherwise licensed.

[hr]

OB1Shinobi wrote: and i can understand that too - the question to me is "where is the line between private ownership and public domain?

I'm glad you asked, OB1.

A work is only public domain if:

1. It belongs to a category of things that cannot be copyrighted, such as names, short phrases, or titles. (All of which can, interestingly, be protected by trademark law instead.)
2. Its copyright has expired, which currently (according to US copyright law) happens 70 years after the author's death; longer if it had corporate authorship.
3. The author releases it to the public domain, which can never be undone.

See how easy that is? Nobody here, posting in this forum, has ever created anything that can legally be considered "public domain" under U.S. law unless they have specifically released it into the public domain, which, for legal purposes, would require a notification of such where one would normally find licensing information (since US copyright law also states that as soon as a copyrightable work is placed in a "fixed form", or published in literally any way at all, it is automatically copyrighted.)

I would like to point out that aside from all that we are quite free to quote verbatum parts of work, with or without permission by the author. On a somewhat larger scale also, add to that the fair use clause. With or without permission by the author one is allowed to use relatively small parts of their work for purposes of commentary and critique including parody and satire, I assume with a reference to the author though. The work one produces oneself in the process, using quotes or larger segments even, is copyrighted then to oneself rather than the host of authors the work of who one borrowed from and can, despite that borrowing, be monetized. Biographies of the living or recently (i.e. <70a) deceased often include copyrighted material in the form of quotes or parts of letters and speeches and can still be sold as the work of the respective biographer with no risk of prosecution on these grounds.

Sorry if I was going off topic here, a little...

steamboat28 wrote:

OB1Shinobi wrote: in your case steamboat i dont know what your exact situation is - but use and display are areas that i would basically disagree with you on

if an artist is credited and the use is not commercial then thats all that matters as far as im concerned

U.S. copyright law, U.S. judges, and a literal army of lawyers nationwide, don't give two f***s about what you think matters. They care about what the law says. Which is that use and display are rights held by the copyright holder unless otherwise licensed.

[hr]

OB1Shinobi wrote: and i can understand that too - the question to me is "where is the line between private ownership and public domain?

I'm glad you asked, OB1.

A work is only public domain if:

1. It belongs to a category of things that cannot be copyrighted, such as names, short phrases, or titles. (All of which can, interestingly, be protected by trademark law instead.)
2. Its copyright has expired, which currently (according to US copyright law) happens 70 years after the author's death; longer if it had corporate authorship.
3. The author releases it to the public domain, which can never be undone.

See how easy that is? Nobody here, posting in this forum, has ever created anything that can legally be considered "public domain" under U.S. law unless they have specifically released it into the public domain, which, for legal purposes, would require a notification of such where one would normally find licensing information (since US copyright law also states that as soon as a copyrightable work is placed in a "fixed form", or published in literally any way at all, it is automatically copyrighted.)

tl;dr

COPYRIGHT LAWS ARE NOT OPINION.
THEY ARE F***ING LAWS.

just because a whole lot of commercialy motivated self important crumidgeons get together amd agree on something doesnt mean its the "right" way

i give no more or less f#&@$ about judges or lawyers or the opinions of people who think their opinions are so excellent that they should be paid simply for having made the effort of dribbling them into the medium of text

this public domain criteria you post is exactly what i mean

lol serioisly -whoever in their right mind ever used the argument "a bunch of lawyers made it that way so it must be right" ?

if you put something onto the internet you have released it unto the public

but of course everyone thinks hes the next van gogh

I watched this ridiculous conversation and all that comes to mind is:

-Knowledge, information and culture should be free (especially between jedi)
-you people (the ones complaining) are very, very wrong, and here is why:


In copyright law there's something called "implied license" which is particularly relevant online. It means that if a user decides to share their copyrighted works with a community without an express license (to my knowledge no-one has ever supplied an express license on totjo with the exception of myself --software/artistic license), then the other users and the website have the right to distribute that same "works" on that same medium (the website). It is perfectly legal for Kitsu to download and store the image since that's what everyone who ever sees anything online does: that's how the technology works.

Lucasfilm however did not supply us with an implied or express license to use or modify their copyrighted "jedi order" logo so we (totjo) do not have the right to store/copy/distribute it. If Kamizu did not obtain an express license from Lucasfilm to use/modify/distribute the "jedi order" logo on totjo then:

-Totjo should discontinue services supplied to kamizu
-Lucasfilm has every right to sue Kamizu for:
--wrongly claiming copyright and wrongly supplying an implied license to totjo.
--modifying and distributing copyrighted works without a license
-The author can sue Kamizu for violating the author's moral rights if the author has some kind of issue with foxes or religion/jediism/totjo.

If Kamizu did however obtain a license from Lucasfilm to modify and distribute the works through totjo, and she actually distributed the image with the license in question, then Kitsu failed to redistribute the image with and according to the license. (which really isn't that big a deal, since totjo would have a copy of that license and authorization to distribute the works already)

the views expressed when copyright was actually called into question were absolutely appalling

Yes, they were.


edit: And before this conversation gets any more ridiculous, You should know that Lucasfilm took action against members of the jedi community in the past for violating copyright/trademark laws, despite their policy of leaving religious jedi stuff in peace. their crime? Publishing "jedi knight" certificates. And people want to drop the "-ism" like it's dirty or something.

Practically speaking copyright lawsuits are ugly. The one I watched people are hacking about it long after the suit is over and one of them is dead. Never been in one, fortunately.

I get concerned about literature I download. While, I haven't downloaded a lot of it, some is clearly in the public domain, some may not be. It may have uploaded wrongly.

For pics, it does look like a free for all on the net. Being basically computer ignorant, I have downloaded but few. They didn't have any names or embedded thingies on them, or come from a personal blog, or have a name associated with them.

Then there are the computer savy able to pull from this and that and link thing this way and that way
from the unknowing to here and there and somewhere. . . .

Computer stuff for me is like cell phones for the elderly. Does that me unJedi? :silly:

I think probably one of biggest problems, at least in my mind, is that google itself has a policy essentially of "index every image it can - worry about DMCA letters later", and to have the biggest corporate entity on the internet (so far as I know at least) freely doing what it can without consideration to artists' rights until something becomes problematic (and have the majority of politicians look the other way to boot) really does set a poor example for the everyday person. That having been said, the temple's library and IP are chock-full of what could be considered copyright violations - this doesn't exactly set the best example either.

But then you also have the other side of the debate which, while holding no legal weight, makes a certain sense from a cosmological perspective - how can anyone truly own an idea, a thought, or a representation of something through patterns of bits of 0's and 1's, especially when according to copyright law, one cannot copyright a number? Essentially digital files are nothing but strings of numbers. If one thinks about it deeply enough, it can start to seem as ridiculous a notion as "owning the land or the sky".

That having been said, I greatly value the works of artists, and do whatever I can to support their work - it's why I continue to pay for Nintendo's virtual console re-releases of NES games rather than simply using an emulator and an illegally obtained ROM - it's less to me about what is legal, and more about what is ethical. In fact, my current avatar was derived from an image taken from google image search without consideration of its original author, and I will be changing it the moment I can find a suitable replacement that conveys a similar concept.

I think that we are in the middle of a huge paradigm shift culturally. Where we are deciding what can be considered fair use. The vast majority of the laws written in the books right now are inadequate. And were written long before there was a public internet. We have a new system that is working itself out as is evidenced by the music industry (the industry I'm trying to eek a living out in). It's difficult. But it can be done. Most of these laws are based around commerce and to protect the people making the money. Copyright law as it is now, wouldn't exist if there we're an ability for financiers to make exhortibant amounts of money from it by exploiting artists creative works. We need to remain open as the paradigm continues to shift and brave enough to blaze a new trail. Keep an open mind lest we begin to become too attached to the past way things have been done and become afraid of losing our own status quo. We of all people are not those who deal in absolutes. Fear of change and need for the power of control are negatives and significant of allowing the ego to dominate.

I publish content to the internet all day everyday for my employer. Whether you think copyright law is stupid or not doesn't matter. It is the law, and you can be held personally liable for breaking it. "Fair Use" still must fall under the legally defined terms, not what any individual thinks is "fair".

As images go, they fall under the same protection whether they are online or not, regardless of who posts them. If you don't believe me, check into Getty images. Photographers license their photos and Getty is VERY active in protecting those rights.

As far as posting online goes, the very act of posting something in a public forum, whoever does it is an implicit agreement to allow the owner of said site and any of its users, servers, or anything interfacing with that site to make copies and distribute said reproductions however they see fit by proxy. You may own the original imedia. But all of those others reproduced on computer monitors are not controllable. Whatever the law says. Law follows commerce. This may seem contrary to commercial use, but it isn't. If you want to protect your right to copy, there is simply no way to get around not posting online. There will always be things that fall through the cracks. In this case the vast majority. The moral and legal groundwork of a society will always follow the morals of the majority of its public. The public is deciding that subscription and freemium are how it chooses to acquire its media. Commercial use is a different animal altogether. If you are basing the public image of your company or your branding on someone else's work, you need to pay them. There are also compulsory licenses that no one has yet discussed.

Don't forget what Steam has already said: those laws protect artists' income. It doesn't matter if they think they're the next van Gogh or the next Beethoven or not; if they actually are or not. They created the work; they own it. And therefore they own the rights to it and to the income that it might generate. Saying that these laws don't matter is near equivalent to saying that these individuals don't deserve their fair income... Or you simply don't care that you're essentially stealing their livelihood from them.

You wouldn't go up to a farmer and say "I can see your corn therefore I'm going to take it and use it without compensating you." So why would you do that to an artist...

We use the internet to promote our work and gain footing in the field. Not to give the rest of you a free for all backstage pass. The internet makes protecting those rights quite difficult sometimes. It can be hard on occasion to track down the original artist. I get that. But those rights still exist and human decency would at least - in my mind - require efforts to be made on everyone's part to preserve those rights.

So if you can live with potentially stealing corn..... I mean income from an artist, then by all mean continue to not care and not at least try to give credit where it's due. And when the original artist asks you to remove your use of the item then by all means, feel free to keep using it.

But I would hope that no one here would willingly and blatantly steal from someone... Especially when that may be the only way they're going to be able to buy food for the week.