A Question of Ethics: Fandom and the Question of Copyright

*sigh*

I have large quantities of stuff I would love to post up on either my gallery or on my deviant art space. But every time I go to do it, I find myself deciding not to.

Why?

Because fan art, especially my desktop images wallpapers (I'm particularlly fond of making collauges,) are in clear violation of copyright. Now I can argue, and probably reasonably sucessfully, that me making the works is within fair use. However, the moment the presentation audience expands beyond myself, and maybe a few of my friends, by say, putting it up on deviant art, what little argument I had dissapears. But because of this, I feel stifeled as an artist. And worse yet, when I'm working with the art of a "fan artist" who has an explicit thing about stealing work, I find myself torn.

Specifically, all forms of fan art are in some way dervitive works, (see Circular 14. from the U.S. Copyright Office) and as such, can only be commisioned by the original author. Because of this, without special permission, drawing your own picture of the Sailor Moon character is a blatent violation of U.S. copyright law. Because of this, people like Fred Gallagher, dispite the fact that they have wounderful talent and bring a whole new outlook to the character, have violated the law.

Now normally I say, let the fan community be. Realisticallty speaking, the fan community (Well, I should specify, the fan artists, not the people who share their favorite animes over the web) Have no intent to devalue the work of the original author. It's just something they do so that they can show thier support for a given work. This behaviour is normal and does nothing but increase the value of the original work. But the moment that those fan artists loose sight of the goal, and begin claiming the inspiration as their own, not only have they fallen away from the spirit of the fan art community, but they have also moved out of the protective shadow of fair use. This is where ol' Mr. Gallagher has gone. He has placed strong limitations on the use of his work, (*read can not use for any purpose*) and as such, hampered the spreading of his work to other fans. The question that comes to my mind is, does he know that he's in violation in the first place.

Mr. Gallagher has endorsed, and even encouraged the generation of fan works derivitive from his work base (Megatokyo) in many situations, but in the same breath he has staunch limits posted on his sight that clearly indicate that in-fact no one without his explicit permission may use his works and even has a link on his site to a group that he participates in of "fan artists" who state with harsh, direct language, that producing derivitive works of their fan works is STEALING. The funny thing to me is that the process of generating fan works classifies as generating dirivitive works in the first place, and that the right to all the content from the original source remains the property of the original author (This has an interesing effect when dealing with works that are in the public domain, since that means that all the content from the source work REMAINS in the public domain, even while used in a derivitive, copyrighted work.) The "crusaders for the preservation of the IP rights of fan artists" are effectively a non group, since they have no IP rights within the context of their works.

So this raises the question to me: why would people like Mr. Gallagher (No, he's not alone, I just like to pick on him because of the pleathora of contradicting evidence,) participate in this kind of practice? If they where complaining about people who don't cite their source or try to claim someone else's work as their own, I'd have no problems. Both of these are not just IP rights problems, their a matter of artist pride and courtesy (Honor among theives ^.~) But it's not about those things (Ok, yes it is, but their arguments include more than that,) it's about people publishing their works in additional contexts and people who derive works of their own based on their work base. Under the common (yet legally flawed) thought process of the fan community, there are two things that should always be allowed. #1, the ability to publish fan works (this rule does carry over slightly into professional works but only under the review section of fair use) that they enjoyed as long as proper source credit is given, and #2 the ability to derive fan works of their own from either a professional work, or another fan work. Now, like I said, this is legally flawed, and BOTH actions are in violation of copyright law, but the community has always felt that these where a fair thing to be alowed to do as long as no compensation was expected. Donations are kosher in he fan work system, but demanding money for premium content derived from a professional work was just wrong.

I guess I should jest send him an e-mail and ask. Maybe his big thing is that he wants to know is who has his stuff so he can keep track of how it's being used. However, I think that's probably not it since he has a quote, "don't snag my stuff. make your own. i'ts more fun :)".

We'll just have to see.

Mood: Depressed, angry, slightly confused

Fiscal Management: The Torture of Self Restraint

Well, I'm broke.

Yup, I bought the car. A nice buggy. The problem is, I now have just enough cash for NDK, and books and thats it. No more pennys. And I'm SERIOUSLY gonna have to save up during this school year. I think with my current lifestyle I've actually been making about $2000 less than I'm spending annually. What this means is that without an adjustment to my fiscal practices, I'm going to either find a way to work more hours, or risk having to skip a semester in order to build up funds. However, both cases are not likely to be reasonable, so the obvious fall back comes into mind: Adjusting my spending habits.

I guess that means that I should actualluy work out a full fledged budget and stick to it. It's going to be rough, but I think that with a $20,000 a year income while living at home, I shouldn't have this much trouble keeping in the black. So I guess it's time to work out the specifics. Now the fact that I'm spending $3000 a semester on books, tuitions, and fees doesn't help. I mean that's $14,000 a year for food, entertainment, supplies, and transportation (Which costs me about $40 a month, $480 annually.)

I purchase 2 meals a day on average mon-fri, 1 on sunday, and 7 meals on saturday (Accounting for other people I buy food for. Since I make the most money of the group, I like to take them out to eat for dinner on saturdays to help spread the wealth.) At $6 a meal that's 6*(2*5+1+7) or 6*18 or $102 a week. That's an additional 408 dollars a month or $5300 annually, so I'm up to $11,780 annually. For supplies for school I spend about $500 a semester (Including clothes, pencils, paper, etc) for $1000 annually, so I'm up to $12,780 annually for all of the other things. This suggests then that I spend about $7000 annually on entertainment. When you consider that I replace either my desktop system or my laptop each year (Spending $1000 for a desktop or $2000 for a laptop) we can account for alot of it. Add the cost of video games and MMORPG subscriptions (currently about $15 a month) and we come to another $1000+ a year. That suggests that my "splurge" budget is running about $4000 a year for things like video cameras, anime, RC cars and the like.

Hmm... I think that the best road for me to take would be to calculate my exact monthly nessicary expenditures (food, transportation, supplies, and MMORPG subscriptions) and then work out how much money I should spend on junk monthly, then calculate how much more I make than that during summer and winter break and see if I'm making enough money to catch up during these times. I actually think that I am, I just have to have more self restraint.

We'll see. ^^

Tada!

Mood:

Pushing the Window: An exploration in Vanadiel timekeeping

Been a while again. Seems the one or two topics I felt like talking about here where so strong to me that I ended up scrapping them in favor of the "If you can't say something nice, say nothing" rule. Now this is a blog, and self-censorship isn't really what one would hope to see, but there's a difference between stating a variance in opinion and lambasting someone. And it just wansn't nessicary for me to say the things I felt like saying, so I didn't. (If your interested as to what I would be so adament about, I scrapped a post on Creationisim and another one on SCO, Linux, and the open source community)

So instead of writing some biting criticisim of people's fundamental views, or attacking the ethics of several groups of people, I'm going to write about my efforts to get my Race Specific Equipment (RSE) in Final Fantasy XI. ^.^;;;

For those of you who don't know, the RSE quests are different than most quests in the FFXI world. Normally, it's get 'this' item (ususally by killing some nutorious monster or by going through a "Big Goron Sword" kind of trade) and then walking some enormous distance to deliver it to someone. The RSE however adds a twist. Each race is given a 1 week (FFXI Time) window of oppertunity to open a chest in one of three zones. Which race can open the chest, and where, cycles every FFXI week. Now each week is 8 Vanadiel days long. Now Vanadiel time runs faster than earth time (25 times faster,) meaning that each Vanadiel day is about 57 minutes long (Actually it's a fraction more than this, but that's close enough). There are 8 races, meaning that each oppertunity comes around every 64 Vanadiel days. What this all means is that in the real world, your oppertunity is right about 7.68 hours long and comes around once every 2.56 or so days.

Now for the dedicated players this isn't a problem, they can get their whole set in 8 hours easy (There's 4 peices, and you really need 2 hours per peice to find the key , then find the chest, warp back to Jeuno, talk to the gobbie, and then get back) Worst case they have to wait for another oppertunity to roll around in 2 and a half days. For us casual players, we have a much larger problem. See the fact that the oppertunity comes around just over two and a half days from the last one, this means that our actual usuable windows only come around every couple of earth weeks. And last for 2 weeks, giving about 3 chances in that time. In my case, for example, the next oppertunity taht lands in my 5 pm - 10 pm usuable window will roll around on the 11th, three days from now, and every second oppertinity after that will be usable for the next 2 weeks. However, this comes just after the two week bad period, where there are no real oppertunities.

But that's not why I'm writing.See... I tried to push the edge of a window that really didn't line up properly with my schedule. I came home with 70 or so minutes left in the window and tried to get my last peice. Well, Tander and I wandered around the Shakrimi Maze killing Wights and Scorpions. It took us 45 minutes to find the key, so we started sprinting around the maze looking for the chest, we searched and searched. Finally in the first place we looked (or overlooked as the case seems to have been) we found the chest with only a couple of Vanadiel minutes to spare (So we're talking earth seconds). Well, unfortunately, in my haste to find the chest, I hadn't payed a whole lot of attention to my safety, and had wrecklessly trained a vary large number of mobs with me. Then, in the process of trying to give the chest the key, I stumbeled (twice) and didn't trade. On the third try, at 23:53 Vanadiel time on Darkday (The last day of the 8 day Vanadiel week) I had gotten my trade window up, my key selected, and was moving to click the trade button when the horde finally managed to finish me off.

*sigh*

After getting a raise from the guy who was supposed to be making sure that the horde didn't kill me in the first place (who I had thuroughly outrun ^^) I took the key, which was now useless, and open the chest to claim my totally worthless 500 gil prize. I had spent the last hour taking great risks, and loosing 1500XP to try and get the RSE that I missed by a matter of seconds. I was seriously disapointed.

But the rule is, "If the oompa-loompa's get you, level up, and go stick it to them" so I'll be back, in a better window. And I WILL get my RSE body peice. -.-

Only three more days till my next attempt...

Mood: Depressed, Frustrated, and Driven