I'm not convinced this is a good idea. all it takes is one jerk who decides they don't need to credit the artist (as a long-time YMtCer these people absolutely exist, and even if none are here now, if the goal is to expand we have to assume we'll catch them eventually.) and everything goes to hell. are we going to have someone constantly monitoring to make sure everything is credited and we have permission to host everything?

a better approach, to my mind, might be to just have a page that lists cool artists that people might want to take a look at, and links to their sites, maybe even categorized by the sorts of things they tend to do. I don't think there's any potential issue with saying "I think Pete Venters is cool, here's his page with his artwork!" (replace Pete Venters with whatever artist you like.) then we could have a section where people could upload and host their own original art.

Having run into one such person recently, this is a valid concern.

Yeah, an open access wiki is a dangerous place to host such a thing. It would need some sort of oversight.

I mean if you're volunteering that'd solve that problem

TPzombieW for President!

~SE++

Yeah I figured that person would be me. Me and maybe some other brave souls.
It's probably not going to happen on NGA wikis by the looks of it.

This is only a legal issue if someone is attempting to make money off of the art. The "worst" thing that could happen is an artist requests you remove content, or change its affiliation.

I'm not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV (or the internet). With that disclaimer out of the way...

I think technically that is incorrect, Soup. Copyright infringement doesn't require the infringer to make - or even attempt to make - a profit. And depending where the art came from (for example, a scan of an image used on a Magic card), a lawyer could pretty easily make an argument for damages inflicted even without any attempt to make money.

There's some gray area, especially when Fair Use comes into play. (It's gray because neither the law nor the courts have ever given exact rules for what constitutes Fair Use; it's left to interpretation in each case.) Since Admin doesn't exactly have a large legal team on retainer, that's one of the reasons I said earlier that any such work would need to be given proper credit and why I like Zombie's "only host with an artist's OK" concept. It's also why our "IP" section of the CoC is written as it is - we err on the side of the copyright holder, and will remove anything upon written request.

So, I'm OK with the concept of building an image library. I'm OK with building a "library" of links with cool art. I'm OK with having both - they aren't mutually exclusive. But for anything where somebody else owns the copyright, we either need to have permission or it needs to be released under a license such as Creative Commons (and then, of course, the terms of the license need to be followed). And, just because it's the right thing to do, credit should be given.

The issue here is "damages," which is where the monetary concern comes into play. Damages have to be provable, and generally it's just not worth it unless there's a lot of money involved. "Permission" is gray and, in my experience, only important when, again, there's money involved--like gaining image rights for a scientific article, for example. I really think all of this is niche though--but also, this seems to be pretty far out there and unlikely to happen anyway.

I took a year of business law. My guess is an actual lawyer would advise against doing anything like this.

Bill Watterson is coming for you.

In fairness, a lawyer would probably advise against a LOT of the stuff we're doing with M:EM.

Only if he can figure out the internet. According to the creator of Pearls before Swine, that's unlikely.

I'm sure WotC knows about Sally's storyline wiki, and I doubt they care about adding fan fiction elements.

I'm more concerned about the fact that we're publishing ebook anthologies.

We're well within our rights to do so, particularly since it's all for free, but Hasbro might decide to say screw the rules, we have money.

The point is, fanfiction of any kind is already walking the knife edge because of the stupid, archaic, anti-art, pro-corporation laws in the US, so it's worth keeping that in mind when we discuss what lawyers would or would not advise us to do.

oh, I didn't know you were doing that.

anyway, fanfiction is a big enough thing that I don't think it's an actual concern, even if they could bring down a legal hammer if they wanted. whereas using individual artists' works without permission is both legally and ethically questionable.

Yeah this was actually my sneaky way of finding out who hasn't read Seasons of Dusk or Fragments yet.

Definitely not arguing that we should use artists' work without permission though. That seems like an obvious nonstarter. The question is more about the advisability of starting a creative commons library.

The ideal thing would be if we could build an actual community of artists here but for a number of reasons I really don't think that's likely to happen.

I'm too lazy at the moment to log out and log back in to my staff account...

I wrote a much longer post that went off on a wide tangent. I decided to scrap it and just say:

I think this about sums it up. From my perspective, citation is necessary not because it's what the law says, but because it's the decent thing to do. I too would prefer if we could become a hub for artists. Getting back to the original question that started this:



Perhaps the best solution is to maintain a "list" of artists, and indicate in the list which ones allow their art to be used and under what circumstances. The goal seems to be "provide YMtC with cool art to use" and that can be accomplished with such a list without running into any of the issues that could arise from hosting somebody's art within the wiki.

-- Fire (in disguise!)

So.

I can't navigate the wiki well enough to be bothered. I keep trying every so often.....

The lore stuff just so outweighs everything else right now that the "all pages" page is swamped with it and everything else is lost in the mess, making it a total pain to find anything. And the only other thing prominently featured on the main page is squinty's sandbox as far as I can tell.

Would you be wiling to put more categories or somewhat better organization for the front page?

Go for it. It's member-driven. If you want content, add content. If you want pages that organize stuff, add it.

(Also, kindly don't refer to M:EM or any other project as a "mess" please. Thanks.)