Rule 3 Addendum - Translations of Others' Works

[Otokonoko Culture]

So, a peak behind the curtain: we (mods) have been aware of the posting of translations for a while, and had various thoughts on it, but the general consensus was that it was in general a small issue that didn't really require any action if it didn't grow much larger. We reconvened on the topic a couple times, and came away with the same general decision.

Then, we learned that we had not one person, but two people do a translation of the same story and post it here. Different translations, same source.

That ended up being what caused us to revisit the most recent time, and the headaches surrounding that (and other valid reasons I'm not going to list), got us to make the decision you see here in this post.

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Was one of them good and the other one trash?

 

[da3monh0st3d]

Sure, that's an okay way to think of it, although reducing my situation down to just "[Poverty]" seems a little... callous? I don't really like that, tbh; at least humanize me a LITTLE bit. There's a person behind the screen, y'know?

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Yeah, that was a thing I hesitated with. I considered just putting ellipsis or something at least somewhat relevant to content/context for those skimming the thread (as I didn't want to embed a full copy of the post). Probably should've gone with ellipsis. I have gone back and adjusted that.

In any case there was no intent to make light of the situation you endured.
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The problem though is that it's pretending to address the problem and then legislators having the option to claim "we're doing something" while literally doing nothing relevant to address the problem.

"Oh good, we've saved the creatives, everyone else can just starve it's fine" just doesn't seem that amazing an outcome to me. And that's at best what copyright does. More generally said creatives will also get trampled by a few large (usually foreign-backed) publishers and will starve too (or will get exploited and only barely not starve).

The solution to that is not making copyright better (odds are it would only be made stronger and used for more exploitation), it's addressing the underlying problem directly, which would also address a lot of other cases at the same time. (For instance, if people fear neither starvation nor homelessness, would-be employers have to actually compete on what they offer employees, garbage conditions will simply result in no applicants and a short trip to bankruptcy.)

 

[danielkid50]

I don't understand the hate for the translations... they are better than a lot of shit on here

 

[mizerie]

I don't understand the hate for the translations... they are better than a lot of shit on here

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They don't hate translations. Its just the admin and mods don't want to have the headache of inviting litigious writers just because a user found their story interesting and posted the translations here. There is already a precedent of it happening (NOTE: Spacebattles' TOUCAN INCIDENT) and they don't want it to happen to them or ever.

 

[joesmith1999]

And that's at best what copyright does.

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At best copyright makes everyone besides creatives starve? Now you've completely lost me, lol.

I guess I don't know for certain that copyright law applies to foreign publishers? Because I haven't looked into it? But I can't imagine why it wouldn't, so that feels like grasping at straws.

I agree that legislators use it as a smoke screen to not address the root issue, but that smokescreen also DOES directly benefit people, so again I don't agree that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The solution to that is not making copyright better, it's addressing the underlying problem directly, which would also address a lot of other cases at the same time.

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"At the same time" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. You and I both know it wouldn't happen "at the same time," let's not kid ourselves here. I'm trying to help you realize that this all-or-nothing solution you've been fed is as much a lie as saying, "actually, copyright law is perfect and has no flaws or downsides." It'd be nice if we lived in a computer where things happen essentially instantaneously, but unfortunately we live in meatspace, where change takes time, especially big change, ESPECIALLY complicated change. Sure, you could say that some of that is stalling, and some of it might be; but really, these systems all have inertia simply by dint of being so large and bulky. Re-directing them takes an appreciable amount of time even in the best case scenario, and as you know we aren't in the best case scenario; pretending that we can just press a button that says 'turn copyright law off' is honestly naïve. Again, as someone who has been on the other side of the equation, who has seen the tip of the iceberg for, "what if we just abolished copyright law overnight," it would be very bad. People would starve to death, who otherwise would not have, as a direct result of that.

Sometimes, the benefits do not outweigh the risks; putting ideology ahead of human life is, uh, counterproductive.

 

[da3monh0st3d]

At best copyright makes everyone besides creatives starve? Now you've completely lost me, lol.

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In the scenario you presented, it leaves everyone else out for the cold. It doesn't directly kill or starve them.

Everyone else stuck in extreme poverty... is still stuck right where they were.

Again, as someone who has been on the other side of the equation, who has seen the tip of the iceberg for, "what if we just abolished copyright law overnight," it would be very bad. People would starve to death, who otherwise would not have, as a direct result of that.

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The extortion you had to deal with was made possible solely because of copyright, there are provenance and attestation technologies usable to prevent impersonation of an author & prove authorship, which no amount of money poured in by malicious parties would be able to do shit about (there are no cryptographically useful quantum computers available and post-quantum cryptography exists anyway).

It wouldn't prevent malicious parties from impersonating you to a few naive or lazy readers that don't bother to check, but any attempt at large-scale deception would fail and they couldn't legally silence you or anyone else. They would be relegated to obvious bootleg resellers. Some would buy from them anyway, many would instead want to buy from you to support the artist.

I was writing a much longer response in that PM but haven't posted it so far.

"At the same time" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. You and I both know it wouldn't happen "at the same time,"

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By "at the same time" I mostly meant "as a consequence of". Fix the problem and the consequences of it are XYZ. Because those other situations are mostly a result of the current unaddressed problem, not independent problems.

it would be very bad. People would starve to death, who otherwise would not have, as a direct result of that.

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They already do or nearly do, including many ostensibly "protected" by it.

Copyright is largely orthogonal to the actual solutions.

And if the prior problem mentioned was addressed, then kicking copyright to the curb would cause none of these issues you suggest would happen (because they would've been made structurally and systematically impossible (within capacity of execution & so on, absolutes don't play well with reality)).

 

[magic9mushroom]

If it weren't for that, I would've made NO more money, because they wouldn't NEED to settle, because it wouldn't be illegal, and I probably would've starved to death within 3 months. If it weren't for copyrights, small authors would never make any money on anything before some huge corpo snatched it away.

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According to other guys in the thread, he shouldn't have had any chance to claim the work as his, period. He should had been happy that he made a contribution to culture, and he shouldn't be allowed to paywall it. Someone else copying his work should actually be praised since they are helping spread the culture (he was on a small editorial so he wouldn't have managed to spread his work by a lot anyways, and hey, they MAY have bought a copy of the book, it is theirs to do as they want now!).

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I'm going to weigh in on this, because nobody so far has actually provided a constructive reply (i.e. a way this could work out without copyright).

1. Simple decentralised patronage.

You post the first chapter for free, and post a Kickstarter basically saying "I wrote a novel, here's the first chapter, pay me $X and I will publish it". You maybe get some trusted source, bound by an NDA, to read the whole thing and testify that the whole novel exists and matches the first chapter's quality. You get paid $X and post the full text.

It is impossible for a corpo to steal it, because the corpos do not have access to the text until after you have already been paid in full. After you have been paid and the text is out, corpos can of course manufacture physical books of it or retain download repositories... and they will barely profit, because it's already publically, legally available and every other corpo can manufacture/upload the same book (creating competition). They are being paid solely for the job of physically manufacturing books or providing download sites (which are useful services, after all), not for anything to do with the content.

Nothing here requires copyright law.

2. Socialism, ho!

You write your work, you submit it to Minitrue Ficdep, they decide what it's worth and pay you $X, taken from taxpayers (because all taxpayers will have access), then post it publically in a download repository and/or manufacture books (the latter presumably priced at the cost of production).

Again, nothing here requires copyright law.


My point here: yes, the business model enabled by copyright does not function without copyright. There are other business models that do. They did, before copyright law; Mozart was supported by patronage, not copyright (although decentralised patronage wasn't yet a thing). And, indeed, the corpos who stole your work only got paid - and thus only had an incentive to slander you - because of copyright.

 

[JadeKaiser]

Yeah, that was a thing I hesitated with. I considered just putting ellipsis or something at least somewhat relevant to content/context for those skimming the thread (as I didn't want to embed a full copy of the post). Probably should've gone with ellipsis. I have gone back and adjusted that.

In any case there was no intent to make light of the situation you endured.
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The problem though is that it's pretending to address the problem and then legislators having the option to claim "we're doing something" while literally doing nothing relevant to address the problem.

"Oh good, we've saved the creatives, everyone else can just starve it's fine" just doesn't seem that amazing an outcome to me. And that's at best what copyright does. More generally said creatives will also get trampled by a few large (usually foreign-backed) publishers and will starve too (or will get exploited and only barely not starve).

The solution to that is not making copyright better (odds are it would only be made stronger and used for more exploitation), it's addressing the underlying problem directly, which would also address a lot of other cases at the same time. (For instance, if people fear neither starvation nor homelessness, would-be employers have to actually compete on what they offer employees, garbage conditions will simply result in no applicants and a short trip to bankruptcy.)

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I'm pretty certain you've gotten very heavily rabbit-holed into arguing something that you likely don't even believe, at this point. When the thread started, you were making sound and reasonable arguments. Not ones I agreed with, but they were at least a sane position to be taking. Now you're saying things that are just straight up absurdities. Things taken right out of a blatant strawman argument, but you're actually arguing it as your position. Equating copyright of a story to market monopolies? Whut? Saying that having no laws protecting the writer's efforts would somehow be less exploitative? What the actual fuck?

I think you need to step back for a bit, look at what you're typing, and ask yourself "Do I really believe this? Or am I just holding this position because it's what the people I was already in an argument with are now arguing against?"

 

[da3monh0st3d]

I'm pretty certain you've gotten very heavily rabbit-holed

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Yes. The problem is that at this point I can neither defend nor explain the ideas properly without running headfirst into Rule 8, which means I can only reply in ways that are at best obtuse and unhelpful (pretty much every source, reference and proper explanation I could provide would be a Rule 8 violation).

QQ is not the best venue for the discussion, in other words.

I do object to the characterization of some points you posted, but ultimately I'd still be arguing in that annoying way that I feel is mostly pointless.

 

[Chastity]

At the point of complete copies going around in the digital wild you should have already gotten your payment for your work. That's my proposal. Trying to make extra profit on top of that through trying to restrict what people can do with their copies in a world where making a copy of such things is so absurdly easy is a losing proposition. The available margins will quickly plummet to near zero no matter what you do.

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Getting rid of copyright does not prevent people from "trying to make extra profit on top." It just lets anyone do it. I have a Patreon that I use to fund video essays that I research? Nothing stopping other people from taking my video essays and uploading them to their YouTube channel to make revenue from ads. Books I wrote can now be published by other parties and sold in bookstores. Digital storefronts can put up copies of my book for "pay what you want." Etc.

 

[da3monh0st3d]

Nothing stopping other people from taking my video essays and uploading them to their YouTube channel to make revenue from ads. Books I wrote can now be published by other parties and sold in bookstores. Digital storefronts can put up copies of my book for "pay what you want." Etc.

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That is where provenance and authorship verification techniques (which incidentally don't even require deanonymization, unlike the very failure-prone alternatives commonly used in academia & corporate settings) come into play.

The cryptographic technologies involved are all pretty mature at this point.

In some mediums it is easier to make it obvious who the creator is, of course (because obviously malicious parties that aren't just reposting for common interest will attempt to strip out the verification information).

Even just a timestamp & early signature casts doubt on any trimmed copy, and further observation of the individual sharing the trimmed copies would fairly quickly reveal a mismatch with other sources and an incapability to produce the same things by themselves.

After all that, the question boils down to: Do the users want to pay/support reposters or the original artists/authors?

Relying on product sales for anything that can be digitalized is a bad business model to start with though.

 

[Chastity]

That is where provenance and authorship verification techniques (which incidentally don't even require deanonymization, unlike the very failure-prone alternatives commonly used in academia & corporate settings) come into play.

The cryptographic technologies involved are all pretty mature at this point.

In some mediums it is easier to make it obvious who the creator is, of course (because obviously malicious parties that aren't just reposting for common interest will attempt to strip out the verification information).

Even just a timestamp & early signature casts doubt on any trimmed copy, and further observation of the individual sharing the trimmed copies would fairly quickly reveal a mismatch with other sources and an incapability to produce the same things by themselves.

After all that, the question boils down to: Do the users want to pay/support reposters or the original artists/authors?

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I specifically and purposefully selected those examples as ones where you do not have to lie about authorship to steal the IP. I can put up a PWYW page on DrivethruRPG, credit the original author, and either not mention, or only mention in fine print, the fact that the original author gets 0% of the profits (or, hell, why not 0.1% of the profits so I can say the profits are "shared"?). I can put up a video on YouTube and mention it was made by John Smith, but upload it to my channel instead of his, and take the ad rev for myself.

Relying on product sales for anything that can be digitalized is a bad business model to start with though.

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The video game industry, the largest entertainment industry in the world at this point, does rely on digital product sales, so clearly not.

 

[da3monh0st3d]

I specifically and purposefully selected those examples as ones where you do not have to lie about authorship to steal the IP. I can put up a PWYW page on DrivethruRPG, credit the original author, and either not mention, or only mention in fine print, the fact that the original author gets 0% of the profits (or, hell, why not 0.1% of the profits so I can say the profits are "shared"?). I can put up a video on YouTube and mention it was made by John Smith, but upload it to my channel instead of his, and take the ad rev for myself.

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At which point that is the user's decision made. My suggestion doesn't stop the users from being assholes. It just enables them not to be if they don't want to.

If they want to, that's a social problem, not a technical or legal problem.

The video game industry, the largest entertainment industry in the world at this point, does rely on digital product sales, so clearly not.

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And for all of their DRM malware shenanigans, the only thing that really allows it to work as a business model is the general laziness of their users.

However, in this case, I will add that I was making not solely a judgement of the effectiveness of it, but also a moral judgement.

There are other effective models for games which I do not object to. They are less popular with large corporations because they do not lead to the highest profits among other options (of course quite a few things are thrown to the side and deprioritized in that quest).

 

[Black wolf]

If someone says "Chinese" without any further elaboration, they presumably mean Mandarin. This is a common usage.

Saying "Indian" without any elaboration could refer to Hindi, but I haven't actually seen anyone use that.

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because there is no indian language... hindi and other widely speaking languages like telugu/tamil are entirely different and thus when speaking about indian languages, people directly use, hindi, tamil etc as the case may be.

 

[John Grandt Markvard Høeg]

What about works where the original author is dead? Thus it is impossible to get permission.

 

[Vanbers]

because there is no indian language... hindi and other widely speaking languages like telugu/tamil are entirely different and thus when speaking about indian languages, people directly use, hindi, tamil etc as the case may be.

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When people say "indian" in reference to the language, they're talking about hindi, unless they have in-depth knowledge of india, the same way when someone says "chinese" they mean mandarin.

Is it possible they mean one of the others? Maybe. But it's like a 9.99999 out of 10 chance it's hindi/mandarin.

 

[Aaron Hardin]

Yeah, that was a thing I hesitated with. I considered just putting ellipsis or something at least somewhat relevant to content/context for those skimming the thread (as I didn't want to embed a full copy of the post). Probably should've gone with ellipsis. I have gone back and adjusted that.

In any case there was no intent to make light of the situation you endured.
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The problem though is that it's pretending to address the problem and then legislators having the option to claim "we're doing something" while literally doing nothing relevant to address the problem.

"Oh good, we've saved the creatives, everyone else can just starve it's fine" just doesn't seem that amazing an outcome to me. And that's at best what copyright does. More generally said creatives will also get trampled by a few large (usually foreign-backed) publishers and will starve too (or will get exploited and only barely not starve).

The solution to that is not making copyright better (odds are it would only be made stronger and used for more exploitation), it's addressing the underlying problem directly, which would also address a lot of other cases at the same time. (For instance, if people fear neither starvation nor homelessness, would-be employers have to actually compete on what they offer employees, garbage conditions will simply result in no applicants and a short trip to bankruptcy.)

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Perfect is the enemy of good. Throwing out a system (trademarks) which has more positive than negative effects because of monopolies without having a replacement system in place will make things worse, that is why countries that have intellectual property rights have more innovation than countries that don't, because the concept, as imperfect as it is, has more positives than negatives. Yes, it can be improved, but that does not mean it should be scrapped altogether.

Also, we seem to be using different definitions of monopolies, I was using the economics definition since we were talking about large scale economic effects, which have monopolies as having exclusive use of a product without similar substitutes, and economists would not consider a copyright on a specific book a monopoly.

My "Snickers" example, Snickers proprietary formula as it were does not prevent people from making their own candy bar with the same or similar mix of chocolate, peanuts, caramel, and nougat, what it prevents is copying the exact same manufacturing process (which means using the same or similar machinery with the same proportion of raw ingredients and the same or similar cooking processes to produce and almost identical product as scale and selling that).

It is why generic "Oreos" exist, other companies can find Ways of making something similar that is not an exact copy and as long as it is not identical and they don't call it an Oreo, it is not a problem.

 

[Otokonoko Culture]

What about works where the original author is dead? Thus it is impossible to get permission.

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If an author is verifiably dead an exception might be made (I think alethio said that), but otherwise SoL.

 

[Megaolix]

Was one of them good and the other one trash?

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It doesn't matter. TECHNICALLY, for translations, no one said you could not do your own translation of a work. We see some mangas with more than one group translating it at times, right? But then it came with a plagiarism accusation and oh boy, we had to consider the future headaches about this kind of scenario.

 

[joesmith1999]

made by John Smith

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Made by my brother, John?

In the scenario you presented, it leaves everyone else out for the cold. It doesn't directly kill or starve them.

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At this point I have to assume I'm either making an error in communication I can't detect, or you're deliberately misunderstanding what I'm saying on purpose, deliberately. Are you seriously suggesting that copyright law is the reason poverty exists?

Spoiler: Long Ass Response

Yes, copyright law doesn't benefit people who don't make money off copyrightable things? I don't see how this makes copyright a detriment TO those people. If it helps Bob get paid, but doesn't help Alice get paid, why would getting rid of it help Alice? Why is it okay to hurt the people who ARE helped by it, just because some other people aren't?

If Bob is on minimum wage, and Alice makes $20 an hour, getting rid of minimum wage doesn't help Alice, and it CERTAINLY doesn't help Bob; because chances are he's working for that low because there are NO OTHER OPTIONS. The company he works for wouldn't have to change anything, because Bob has nowhere else to go. They can gleefully pay him 50 cents an hour and rest assured that he won't leave, because he literally CAN'T.

And don't start saying something about fixing the underlying issue; you can claim it's not necessary in a world of Universal Basic Income until you're blue in the face, it doesn't change the fact that we do not live in that world, and until we do, getting rid of it would help NO ONE.

The extortion you had to deal with was made possible solely because of copyright, there are provenance and attestation technologies usable to prevent impersonation of an author & prove authorship

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Setting aside the fact that they DID actually change some names, thus making some kind of blockchain-esque horseshit useless (yet again); if copyright did NOT exist, they would have still stolen my labor, AND gotten away with it completely scot-free!

Earlier, you said, "Any retelling that isn't verbatim copying is new material by definition," meaning that you think what happened to me should be allowed. In your definition of new material, by changing a couple names, actually they DID write an entirely new 80k word novel; they were just heavily influenced by some other chump's novel, but that's culture, baby! And after all, "To participate in culture is to accept that the fruit of one's labor shared are thence part of culture," right? So the artistic labor I put into writing my novel doesn't deserve compensation, right? Or maybe you think it deserves some small compensation, but no more than the bare minimum, and I should be ashamed for asking at all.

You can't treat books, songs, paintings, etc., the same as you can treat commodities, because they take more time and effort to create and can be copied relatively easily; that's why copyright law is necessary, not why it's NOT necessary. Most art takes an insane amount of time and effort to create compared to basically all commodities. A novel or an album is less like a glass or a table, and more like a smartphone or a surgical robot; something that would take an immense amount of expertise, know-how, skill of manufacturing, perseverance, prototyping, lateral thinking, and time, even for a whole team of people, LET ALONE a single person! Writers and musicians and painters are artisans, people who dedicate a huge portion of their limited time on Earth to become masters of their craft, to enrich their cultures, to express rich human emotions so that other people can feel their feelings. And you think they should just be content to starve? Simply because the result of their labor can easily be copied? Because the system which lets them do so is distasteful to you?

A physical object, i.e. a wrench, can only be in one place at a time, can only be used by so many people, so someone who makes wrenches for a living doesn't need to worry about someone else invalidating their business model by pressing Ctrl+C Ctrl+V; they still have to compete on quality and cost, and huge corporations still have an unfair advantage, but at least the companies can't literally steal the wrenches after they've been made for essentially zero cost and sell them for so cheap that they become the only gig in town. Art needs additional laws to protect it BECAUSE it's so easily copied, because without copyright protection it CAN be literally stolen after it's made for essentially zero cost and resold for a pittance, and companies WILL do so even if it only makes them a tiny profit.

They would be relegated to obvious bootleg resellers. Some would buy from them anyway, many would instead want to buy from you to support the artist.

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I KNOW this isn't true! and I can DEFINITIVELY prove it! Because YOU have argued that copying is not a bad thing. YOU are arguing that copyright law shouldn't exist, that, "The very notion of needing to ask permission to retell a story...is just utterly bizarre." "Copying isn't Theft," remember that song in those videos you posted? I KNOW people wouldn't seek out the original artist, because YOU are already arguing that they shouldn't, that all works are already a shared part of our collective culture, and thus deserve no compensation. Many people RIGHT NOW don't want to support the artist. Some people are even arguing that art doesn't deserve payment of any kind, and that copying something is a moral good, actually. If copyright didn't exist, it would be completely legal, so even MORE people would do it.

The normal opinion of most non-artists is that art has no material value, and, "Actually artists are just ARROGANT for expecting money for something they should be doing for free; they should just make art because they love art, not because they think people might like it enough to pay for it," conveniently forgetting that art is also a job people use to feed themselves.

Because those other situations are mostly a result of the current unaddressed problem, not independent problems.

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And how does removing copyright law fix that unaddressed problem? If it's as you say and copyright law is a symptom of the problem and not the actual problem, treating the symptom instead of the cause doesn't ACTUALLY help; it's the same kind of spinning your wheels that legislators do to pretend they're helping.

And if the prior problem mentioned was addressed, then kicking copyright to the curb would cause none of these issues you suggest would happen

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Yeah, sure, if Universal Basic Income existed, then I wouldn't have needed copyright law to not starve to death.

Except—and you might be surprised to learn this—it does not currently exist. Telling someone, "I know we're removing the lifeline that you use to feed your family based purely on ideological distaste, but don't worry! Some day in the future it will have become retroactively unnecessary! Doesn't that make you feel better now?" is completely backwards. You want to help people by making it even harder to survive in the "system which is already hard to survive"??

Do you seriously think, after what happened to me, I just brushed my hands together and thought, "Well, glad that's over! Thank you, legal system, I feel represented and made whole! This is how things should be!" and completely stopped thinking about it? Because that's honestly insulting. After going through that soul-churning process (and again, if you haven't actually been through it, you seriously have no idea what the fuck you're talking about), of course I thought about it! Because I realized that I had taken for granted, "You own what you create, and no one can take it from you without your permission," when obviously it wasn't so simple in practice.

I have spent YEARS thinking about it. Analyzing what happened, why it happened, what they did, what I did, what they COULD'VE done, and what I could have done. I've thought about it socially and economically; philosophically and pragmatically; I've considered the artist's perspective and the publisher's perspective and the lawyer's perspective and the legislature's perspective. I've read laws, "thinktank" nonsense, and more court filings than you could DREAM of. I have stared into the abyss of the American legal system and pissed in its mouth.

Everything you've brought up, I have already thought of. Days of pacing, nights of staring at the ceiling, entire weekends' worth of long showers—if there's a stereotypical place for navel-gazing, I've probably been there, thinking about it.

So believe me when I say, I understand where you're coming from. It's tempting to imagine that if we just threw out all the current systems and started from scratch, then we could build them from the ground up to be TRULY egalitarian. But the very fact that you and I—two smart and, dare I say, devilishly handsome individuals—can come to two opposite conclusions which both sound reasonable, is proof that the "burn it all down" mentality wouldn't end with a shiny new utopia; it would just leave ash and embers.

And about those "provenance and attestation" technologies: trust me, I get the temptation to use technology to solve all of these problems more cleanly and efficiently; I get it, I truly do! It seems so obvious, why would anyone argue against it? Well I'll tell you why I'm arguing against it, why this seemingly brilliant idea is actually shortsighted and STUPID:

We exist in a world where corporations already exert incredible influence over our lives, and are immensely more powerful than individual people could ever hope to be; more powerful than giant GROUPS of individual people could ever hope to be. Some corporations are already so powerful, so technologically mighty, that they are beyond the reach of the IRS.

Making more of our daily lives reliant on technology would all but seal our fate as eternal corporate slaves; it would make Shadowrun and Cyberpunk look like JOKES. You are advocating for giving a few corporations the keys to the kingdom, giving them free reign to trample us all without even needing to ATTEMPT to PRETEND like they're not.

You write software for a living, yes? Presumably at a software company? When you start saying things like, "We can just use cryptographically mature methods to decouple the need to safeguard Art from pesky, out-of-date legal requirements; technology evolves much faster than legislation, after all," you begin to sound like the doublespeaking CEOs of massive tech companies already trying to completely control our lives. The kind of person I'm sure you're familiar with, who spends hour long meetings pretending to gather consensus while shooting down ideas that aren't theirs just so no one can say, "I knew this was a bad idea." Don't let them infect your mind with their techno-optimism; some problems CANNOT be solved by technology alone. Heard of Youtube DMCA takedowns bypassing fair use? THAT needs more laws, better laws, not more technology.

Again, is copyright perfect? No. Is it completely internally logically sound that you need to prove permission was given to translate a fanfic, but not to write a fanfic to begin with? Probably not. Is it silly and infuriating that QQ needs this Rule 3 Addendum to avoid potential, costly litigation? Yes.

Do I blame the mods for doing their best to work within the system we all currently exist inside of? Do I blame them for doing their best to keep the lights on? Do those things mean the alternative of "no-copyright extremism" is better? Emphatically, NO.

 

[Kinematics]

I should probably retract my earlier (exaggerated) statement about copyright doing more harm than good. It would be more accurate to say that I believe the current implementation of copyright in the US is an overreach that goes well beyond the boundaries of the 'good' that copyright is intended to provide, and allows abusive and 'evil' behavior that tarnishes people's perceptions of it. The bad stands out more than the good, so it's easy to forget the basic intended benefits such as @joesmith1999 's situation.

As for the new rule: After a couple days to let things settle, it now feels more like just an annoyance that I can get over. Obviously the people running QQ get to decide what they allow on here. Not allowing "feature creep" is, I think, actually important. This isn't an image board (despite image threads); there's no subforum for political discussion; and now they're deciding they don't want the encroachment of being a fan translation site. There are other sites that focus on that, and I can use them if that's what I want.

From that perspective, it isn't even a matter of copyright or legal threats. It's just maintaining a certain purity of focus, so the site doesn't collapse under the weight of trying to be all things for all people (as has happened to many sites over the last couple decades). Adding the "get permission" barrier uses copyright as a hurdle to add friction to the process that might conceivably overwhelm the original purpose of the site, while still allowing a little bit of give.

Though whether the staff is actually thinking about things in this way, I don't know.

 

[JadeKaiser]

The duplicate translations thing, it should be noted, was not "the reason this happened." It was the trigger that got the rest of the staff to finally pay attention after a long while of a few of us regularly bringing it up, and it being ignored or put off for the umpteenth time. Which still almost happened yet again. Saying that the one event was why this happened, is frankly rather annoying to me as one of those who've been bringing it up regularly, and who had to make a concerted effort about it this time too before any decision was finally made one way or the other.

It's been my growing fear that the 'we'll deal with it when it becomes a problem' attitude towards it would keep going right up until it 'became a problem' by a publisher actually suing us, at which point it would be too late.

I should probably retract my earlier (exaggerated) statement about copyright doing more harm than good. It would be more accurate to say that I believe the current implementation of copyright in the US is an overreach that goes well beyond the boundaries of the 'good' that copyright is intended to provide, and allows abusive and 'evil' behavior that tarnishes people's perceptions of it. The bad stands out more than the good, so it's easy to forget the basic intended benefits such as @joesmith1999 's situation.

As for the new rule: After a couple days to let things settle, it now feels more like just an annoyance that I can get over. Obviously the people running QQ get to decide what they allow on here. Not allowing "feature creep" is, I think, actually important. This isn't an image board (despite image threads); there's no subforum for political discussion; and now they're deciding they don't want the encroachment of being a fan translation site. There are other sites that focus on that, and I can use them if that's what I want.

From that perspective, it isn't even a matter of copyright or legal threats. It's just maintaining a certain purity of focus, so the site doesn't collapse under the weight of trying to be all things for all people (as has happened to many sites over the last couple decades). Adding the "get permission" barrier uses copyright as a hurdle to add friction to the process that might conceivably overwhelm the original purpose of the site, while still allowing a little bit of give.

Though whether the staff is actually thinking about things in this way, I don't know.

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The 'translations clogging up the front page' issue, as we tended to put it, was part of the matter, yes. Not nearly all of it though, the potential for legal issues was the main one. Something as basic as "show us you've got permission" is an extremely reasonable and common step that sites like ours use not just to prevent legal problems, but also just basic inter-board drama. Applying it evenly to translations like we do for stuff that doesn't need a translation, is not unreasonable or any kind of great ask.

If it was just the 'feature creep' issue, we probably would have just kept leaving it alone until the crowding was being noticed and complained about by people more often, and then made a new subforum or something to start dumping them in.

 

[da3monh0st3d]

I tire greatly of dancing around Rule 8, I've been attempting to disengage as I cannot engage in the conversation good faith on QQ.

which have monopolies as having exclusive use of a product without similar substitutes, and economists would not consider a copyright on a specific book a monopoly.

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It literally derives from royal monopoly laws.

That's (and similar cases) where the useful and commonly used meaning of monopoly derives from.

they would have still stolen my labor, AND gotten away with it completely scot-free!

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That gets a bit complicated, but unless they manipulated the situation as to coerce you into working or otherwise coerced you (one cannot dismiss this possibility out of hand, copyright monopolists do pull that shit), they would have "stolen" the work/artpiece, not the labor.

Gotten away with little to show for it if the social and technical mechanisms to demonstrate your authorship were in use, too. In their absence, you would have both been competing on distribution while your compensation for your labor as an artist was unfortunately tied to that rather than your creative labor itself. That is not ideal.

I'm either making an error in communication I can't detect, or you're deliberately misunderstanding what I'm saying on purpose, deliberately. Are you seriously suggesting that copyright law is the reason poverty exists?

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No, I'm pretty sure you're misinterpreting what I'm saying at this point. (Or dressing me up as some strawman. Can we stop?)

Is it silly and infuriating that QQ needs this Rule 3 Addendum to avoid potential, costly litigation? Yes.

Do I blame the mods for doing their best to work within the system we all currently exist inside of? Do I blame them for doing their best to keep the lights on?

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Neither do I nor have I ever implied so.

Earlier, you said, "Any retelling that isn't verbatim copying is new material by definition," meaning that you think what happened to me should be allowed. In your definition of new material, by changing a couple names, actually they DID write an entirely new 80k word novel; they were just heavily influenced by some other chump's novel, but that's culture, baby! And after all, "To participate in culture is to accept that the fruit of one's labor shared are thence part of culture," right? So the artistic labor I put into writing my novel doesn't deserve compensation, right? Or maybe you think it deserves some small compensation, but no more than the bare minimum, and I should be ashamed for asking at all.

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Yes they should be allowed.

Sufficiently heavy influence or similarity as to visibly reflect their lack of artistic ability and skill, given that even in their lack of originality they made no meaningful alteration/contribution to the work that substantially improves its quality. This would be obvious to any reader that bothers to check.

YOU are already arguing that they shouldn't, that all works are already a shared part of our collective culture, and thus deserve no compensation.

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The works do not deserve compensation, the labor does.

I never said anything about how much the labor should be compensated or that there should even be any caps on what you manage to get the labor compensated for.

I KNOW this isn't true! and I can DEFINITIVELY prove it! Because YOU have argued that copying is not a bad thing. YOU are arguing that copyright law shouldn't exist,

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There's so much purposeful misrepresentation of my arguments in this section I'm just not going to bother.

Yeah, sure, if Universal Basic Income existed, then I wouldn't have needed copyright law to not starve to death.

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Indeed.

but don't worry! Some day in the future it will have become retroactively unnecessary! Doesn't that make you feel better now?" is completely backwards. You want to help people by making it even harder to survive in the "system which is already hard to survive"??

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And now you're pretending I offered that order of operations for removing copyright.

As a matter of fact, I offered the exact opposite. Fix the underlying problems, then remove the now redundant monopoly system.

And about those "provenance and attestation" technologies: trust me, I get the temptation to use technology to solve all of these problems more cleanly and efficiently;

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I made mention of the need for social mechanisms for these things to work (albeit indirectly the draft where I mentioned various observer schemes and social options didn't make it apparently?, I'm not sure where it went), and further asserted that if users want to be assholes, technology won't stop them.

thus making some kind of blockchain-esque horseshit useless (yet again)

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There are a lot of better options than distributed ledgers, there's a reason I didn't bring them up.

When you start saying things like, "We can just use cryptographically mature methods to decouple the need to safeguard Art from pesky, out-of-date legal requirements; technology evolves much faster than legislation, after all,

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The technologies I'm suggesting are literally 30 years old (and some of the compatible social & economic dynamics alluded to are older by centuries). This is not some "move fast and break things" bullshit and I resent the characterization.

At this point I'm considering just not replying, regardless of how rude it'd be.

 

[Azraelith]

I tire greatly of dancing around Rule 8, I've been attempting to disengage as I cannot engage in the conversation good faith on QQ.

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Not to be rude or anything but uh you've been pretty steamed the last few pages, maybe just block the person and move on as opposed to non-stop coming back cause of the ol' "I ain't heard no bell!"

 

[da3monh0st3d]

Not to be rude or anything but uh you've been pretty steamed the last few pages,

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I didn't perceive it that way (if by steamed you mean angered, if you mean stuck & not really able to continue, then yeah), but in any case yes to just moving on. Strongly considering it.

 

[KinKrow]

Not to be rude or anything but uh you've been pretty steamed the last few pages, maybe just block the person and move on as opposed to non-stop coming back cause of the ol' "I ain't heard no bell!"

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Cost sunk fallacy is a bitch.

 

[Aaron Hardin]

It literally derives from royal monopoly laws.

That's (and similar cases) where the useful and commonly used meaning

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I am an American, why would I subscribe to the very specifically Brittish version of Copyright law instead of the American version.

There may be problems with the British version of copyright law that are much worse than the American version, but you just said copyright law, not British copyright law, so it looked like your problem was with the concept of Copyright law as a whole, not how The UK implements their copyright law specifically.

 

[Void]

Hrm.

Glancing at the new rule, and for whatever reason subjecting myself to glancing through the thread.

Well, I just feel old when I'm not that old. As the conversation practically skips over the broader issues which are directly relevant to this conversation that's occurring all over the internet, that's has been occurring for decades at this point.

Namely how Manga/Manhwa/Manhua translation, anime fan translations, and the light novel translations has been a game of legal wackamole of big sites getting the legal hammer, and rapidly new sites popping up to replace it as people scurry to save and mirror the content on a dozen new websites. Translations without explicit permission by the author are very much viewed as infringing on copyright, a right publishers can purchase from the authors. Once upon a time due to the far less globalized system of automated of discovery and enforcement on internet, you could translate works from other countries rather safely even if the translation rights were picked up by a publisher since generally they wouldn't know about you, that's not so much the case anymore.(Or more directly relevant to QQ, Hentai/doujinshi translation sites getting legally hammered. Such how Nhentai nearly disappeared not too long ago.)

RIP the several online manga reading, light novel, and hentai websites that now exist only in bookmarks that I haven't bothered to clean out.

In short for anything original, QQ has decided to not be one of the website to jump on the legal grenade if any of those stories get picked up by a publisher and the crawler bots find said translations on the site(Then extended it to translated fanfiction for good measure). Since unlike fanfiction, translation copyright/translation rights are a far, far more settled matter legally than the unenforced grey area playground of fanfiction.

 

[Otokonoko Culture]

But then it came with a plagiarism accusation and oh boy, we had to consider the future headaches about this kind of scenario.

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So one of them IS good and the other is trash and the trashy one started screeching for intervention from the mods.

Nice.

 

[joesmith1999]

I've been attempting to disengage

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Ah, you were trying to stop the whole time? My bad; I forget not everyone likes arguing as much as me, hahaha! Not responding isn't rude, we aren't having a face-to-face conversation, you know? Insert "Just Walk Out" meme. Quitting the argument is like 50% of the best part.


It's been nice putting thought to word again. Maybe it's time to start writing some more.