No strawman here. The reason you complained is because eBay pulled your piece. The reason eBay pulled it is because it is illegal. They’re covering their asses because they don’t want to get sued. (And covering yours in the process, if you think about it.) Somewhere along the line you’ve shifted the argument to the superiority of the Japanese copyright system. Fine, but that didn’t appear in your original gripe, and it doesn’t have a bearing on eBay’s responsibilities.
For whatever reason, someone picked your artwork to report as inappropriate. And eBay would rather keep their cash than pay out big bucks for copyright infringement because they let you sell something that wasn’t yours. How horrible of them. What are they supposed to do, stand by you and help you rail against the establishment? What was that phrase again? “Money talks, you walk.”
I agree with pulykamell and yosemitebabe. Draw your own artwork or take your own photos. OR, get permission to use other people’s photos. Then nobody can touch your stuff.
I like how you didn’t answer the question.
Yes, there may be a lot of ‘snarky cheapskates’ here, but it doesn’t stop people from trying to ‘discretely’ shill their stuff. Which is, I might add, what I think you are doing.
Legally, it’s best that you not express yourself, ever. Also, I note you guys are basing character’s on Roger Zelazny’s Amber novels. have you contacted his estate to see if they approve or not? I’m sure Zelazny’s estate has a right to control how his characters are portrayed … at least, in this Shadow.
I’m guessing the point about the other people vending Christina and Britney’s image made absolutely no impression on you. A law or rule must be enforced with something approaching equanimity if people are to respect it. Definitely not the case here. Frex, speeding laws where I live are enforced, if that’s the right word, with extreme lack of equanimity. Do people respect them? NO!
YOU move to Japan. I’m a proud American, happy to live here and do my best to make this a better country. We need to learn from others when they do better than us, not just reject them “cuz we’re stoopid.”
No, I am not shilling my stuff here. There are a LOT of better venues for shilling one’s stuff elsewhere. Frex, other forums where people have an interest in artwork of a Groean nature. I can openly go to such forums and say, “Got some gorean artwork here you might enjoy!” And the people THERE might buy it.
I really, truly, honestly, from the depths of my heart, think that attempting to shill Gorean artwork on the BBQ Pit on SDMB is the stupidest marketing concept imaginable. I’m just having fun educating people about the downsides of U.S. copyright law. Really.
I’m sorry. I didn’t want to say this, but me and all the working photographers who make the sale of their photographs their livelihood, I’ll give you a big FUCK YOU! Copyright seems to keep regular folk from making money? Just who in the fuck do you think you are? What, photographers aren’t regular folk trying to keep their interests? Hey, the copyright laws are there to protect me from fucknuts trying to profit off my images without paying me to use the images. You’re stealing from me…what about that don’t you understand? It’s not usually average Joe we have to worry about – like I said, if I caught you using my work, I’d simply ask you to remove it – but the laws are there to protect the creatives who have to make a living from their work.
In point of fact, the MUSH on which this character is portrayed is a Zelazny/Zelazny-estate sanctioned MUSH. Fanfiction is typically allowed regardless, provided it is openly portrayed as such and is not sold. I’ve seen some absolutely wonderfulHarry Potter fanfic that was as good or better than whatshername wrote (I recommend '‘Trouble’ and then ‘Traps & Treasures’, nearly 100K words in length), but since free, no apparent legal problem. As far as I can tell, it’s only when you begin to sell such work, or claim yourself the creator of the concepts/images, THEN you get your ass chewed. I think.
Dunno. This is the kind of situation that copyright lawyers would haggle over.
I think a point that’s being missed is that copyrights are not just to prevent others from making money off an image, they’re to give the artists control over how their work is used.
You DO realize that what this argument boils down to is “Other people are doing it and not getting called on it! It’s not FAIR!”
EBay is too large to do anything except depend on outside comments to police itself for illegal auctions. If it bothers you so much that other artists are doing illegal stuff too and getting away with it, report 'em.
Your speeding analogy is apt, but not in the way you probably intended. People speed because they want to go fast and the risks are relatively low. The solution isn’t gonna be “raise the speed limit, so that those people won’t be breaking the law,” it’ll be “put more cops out there and raise the cost of tickets.” You’ll still get caught, but you’ll pay more, and more people will be caught along with you.
I don’t have your incentive to move to Japan. I create my own artwork with my own images.
The copyright laws as they exist clearly piss the hell out of you. (For what it’s worth, I agree that they’re too restrictive.) Fine. DO something about it! Lobby your congresspeople. Write your local newspapers. Create posters and stick 'em to telephone poles. Suggest solutions. Get the message out there that there ARE in fact other ways to handle copyright issues. Don’t just break the laws. All that does is give “the man” the incentive to scream louder about all the criminals and lobby the lawmakers to tighten the noose.
Had you not bragged and crowed so much about it, perhaps people wouldn’t be coming down so hard on you. Many people don’t like unjustified arrogance. And it was unjustified. You seemed to think that you created something utterly fabulous there, and that someone reported you because they were jealous of your abilitites. I find that highly doubtful.
I thought I had a website posted in my profile, which had some examples of my artwork. But I just clicked on the link and it didn’t come up. Oh well.
Here are some new links. Granted, I’ve never crowed about being that good (I’m no Frazetta or Boris and can only do a semi-decent figure from my imagination—sometimes that’s dicey). But still, I’ll let everyone else decide if I have any credibility in this matter.
Home Page. There I’ve got two portraits I made up completely from my imagination. No photos to look at (or trace), no copy and paste, no nothing. (I have to repeat this with some people because they assume that all artists use photos and some assume that we trace these photos. But many artists don’t have to do either.)
The figure drawing was done in Life Drawing class and probably took two minutes. Just put ink to paper. No sketching out an outline beforehand.
Some more art. I just sort of slapped this page together on the fly. Explanations on the page. Nothing too great, mind (I’m very lazy about scanning in my work), but, once again, I hope it’ll give people an idea of whether I can put my money where my mouth is.
By the way, I do have an example of some fan art up there. I don’t really have a problem with some fan art and I think it’s got a rich tradition, but even us fan artists (and I occasionally am one) have to be aware that we can’t be selling prints or making the big bucks. I think that a lot of fan art can fall under the fair use umbrella, but if a copyright holder wanted me to remove some of my fan art from my site, I would do so without complaint.
Okay, fair enough. There was a part of me that admired someone who could sling so much artsy-fartsy bullshit.
Once again, fair enough. However, we all can learn from each other, and you’ve got a prime opportunity here.
By the way, you never did tell me who did those rather miserable pencil (or charcoal) drawings on that bondage page. Whoever did that needs to brush up on some skills.
I am impressed that you have “paid my dues and then some”, I get the impression that you are a kid based on your “lingo” (“coin”, “bro”), I have been “paying my dues” since I was 16 or so (just over 20 years) and a cool home based job sure sounds cool but I know that it is not a reality.
Yeah, I could be way off base, but that was my first impression too.
Also, it seems like the ones who play up their massive talent and really go overboard with self-praise are the ones that often have no clue. Younger people (who haven’t had the years to have enough experience) or relative art newbies are more apt to have inflated ideas of their own ability. (Though of course not all newbies are like this, nor are all young males.) If I had a quarter for every time a young male (for some reason it’s usually males) who looked at my artwork or the artwork of someone else and said, "I could do that too . . . " But they can’t. Not without a lot more training. They just don’t realize it.
Of course, more experienced people can sometimes live in a cloud of delusion for long periods of time and I expect that we all are deluded to some small extent. To have a large amount of delusion is a little more unusual, because added experience and exposure to peers’ works removes a lot of the delusion.
Uh, hello, dumbass? That wasn’t addressed to you. It was addressed to another clown who missed the point entirely. I wouldn’t even waste rational arguments on you, because it is so absolutely, unquestionably obvious that your “art” is complete shit, and illegal, and immoral, and an utter waste of time, and that you are a little wet-behind-the-ears punk who ‘don’t know what he don’t know’ yet, and that you would just make up some horribly absurd excuse why rational arguments don’t apply to you, that it would be pointless. It’s much more fun to see you continue to embarass yourself in the face of an entire thread full of people who all think you’re a fucking joke.
Ha ha - He thinks he’s in Great Debates or something. Please keep it up; It’s been awhile since I’ve had such a laugh.
So many people underestimate the amount of training and knowledge necessary to produce a work of art. One of my neices is pretty good at drawing. A few years ago I purchased a small copy of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” When I showed it to my sister, she kind of grinned and shook her head, then said something like "Why is it that some of these people become so famous painting stuff like this. It looks like something Ashley (my neice, who was 13 or 14 yrs. old at the time) could do in half an hour.
I replied that it only looked that way and asked Ashley, who happened to be walking in from the other room, if she thought she could draw or paint a picture that looked like that. She looked at it, seemed kind of embarrassed, then, with a tone that seemed to suggest she thought we were being silly, said, “No, not really!”
Japanese copyright and trademark law is not that substantially different from American law (and international law, when applicable). In the case of fan-produced artwork (“doujinshi”), the only reason that the majority of fans who make these are not sued for violating the trademark laws is because the companies in question choose not to sue them. Rather, a great many of these companies view doujinshi artists as a potential source of future talent.
But Japanese companies can – and do – defend their trademarks quite vigorously. Cases in point: Gainax has tried to hold tight rein over images and music from Neon Genesis Evangelion, to the extent of sending specific cease-and-desist orders to specific ISPs.
Nintendo also keeps tight controls on their characters, especially after some (urk) pornographic Pokemon doujinshi were published a few years back.
One other difference between what doujinshi artists do and what you’ve done; doujinshi artists don’t copy/Photoshop their images. They (or their writer partners) come up with entire storylines, and draw entire chapters of their favorite manga from scratch – no copying. And, as evidenced by the Pokemon case, that is also illegal, and if the copyright holder chooses to, they can force you to stop.
You might also want to throw this into the plotline: the space transporters accidentally transported them into a poorly-executed photoshop hack job. That should cover most of the objections people have raised here.
For future reference: Being unwilling to pay money for a particular piece of “erotic” art doesn’t necessarily make you a cheapskate or a prude. It might just mean you think it’s crap.
PS: It’s crap. Your digital watermarking efforts are wasted. The reason you’re not raking in the dough is not that everyone on the internet is stealing your artwork, it’s that they’re looking at it and shaking their heads in bewilderment. Normally, I wouldn’t weigh in on what’s arguably a matter of aesthetics and personal opinion, but not only is your work particularly bad, but you’re a complete asshole on top of it.
PPS: I know, I know, that old saying about great minds always facing opposition, and the idea that groundbreaking art is understood by few, etc. You’re deluded.
Oh, and people being willing to buy your work over the internet doesn’t mean much - people on the internet have shown themselves willing to buy pretty much anything. Spam does bring in sales, and 34 ebayers bid on snow: http://www.whattheheck.com/ebay/buffalosnow.html
See, most people who make Photoshopped whack-off celebrity “art” simply find a celebrity photo that shows them in fairly even light, grab most of their body, and paste it onto a nude image of a nude whoever who has fairly similar proportions. They then use the clone stamps and colouring to make a reasonable facsimile of the nude celebrity.
You grabbed a bunch of disjointed photos with different lighting and different effects, jumbled them all together, drew on horrible-looking ball gags, and stuck them on a cheap background. I am awed at your talent in taking a load of professional photos and removing not only focus and sexual appeal from the both of them, but writing the finished piece up in a way befitting a piece of art far superior to yours.
Please keep it up; It’s been awhile since I’ve had such a laugh.
