Board Thread:Policies/@comment-24800939-20160420135146/@comment-10473115-20160501125639

Thanks to Artful for bringing up the copyright issue. I don't understand how I could have overlooked and forgotten it. All fan fiction is copyright violation in itself and would need a permission from both the artist and Marvel. That still doesn't mean that we have to get rid of all fan art because copyright holders haven't been very active at removing fan fiction from the web. So it's possible to leave fan art as it is and react only to possible DMCA takedown notice from Marvel. It might never come as they could see us as a benefit for their business and possible clash with your own fans is better to be avoided. I could add that our interpretation of fair use is so liberal that I wouldn't go to court with but because Marvel hasn't made any reservations, there's no need to change it.

To sum it up, we have to make a very clear distinction between fan art and fair use images. It would be better for any web site to only use either fan art or fair use. However, fan art has been allowed here so long without any problems with Marvel that we could continue that with community consensus. That consensus would be ignored if Marvel decides to contact Wikia about the matter. To make distinction clear it's best to categorize all fan art to Category:Fan Art Images like before and merge Category:Public Domain (Fan Art) to that. Fan art is not public domain and therefore their license should be just fan art.

With all that said, I think it's too much trouble for few images on user pages and have changed my opinion to support Artful for deleting and banning all fan art from our site. We should start a new discussion for it without any instructions to change templates or image types. And if we decide to delete fan art, we shouldn't edit user pages to remove links to images or templates because it's not needed. We just delete images and they won't show up.