So I've been trying to sort out the images and I've began to notice a trend. About 90% of Fan Art images are either unlicencesed or have no evidence the designer gave permission for it to be used. I shall begin the task of deleting these soon but my question is, since so much of the Fan Art is here without permission, do we need to have Fan Art Gallery's and such on characters pages? I feel that some users see there is a fan art section and start adding random images from deviantart with no concern fot original artist this uploads section. Also we are supposed to be a knowledge base of official information and Fan Art definitly isn't. I'm not saying we shouldn't have Fan Art, but that it should stay on a user page or something. What are peoples opinions?
Looks great and your examples are excellent.
I am fine with a periodic check of User Images.
Only one change. I think your gallery type needs to be "User Gallery" and not just "User". I have changed your gallery and, along with a few others which were already there. I think this is right, but I am not 100% sure.
I also updated the Gallery:Contents page to show these new links.
Mrkermit wrote: 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.
And after few hours, notice is up to instruct how to protect user pages and change image type and licensing. This thread continues to be the most frustrating discussion I've had on the site. I don't care about fan art on user pages enough to fight for it, I could live what you decide on it. However, I want to make few points about the matter. This time I'll use bulleted lists to see if that helps to understand me.
- The artist can't give permission to use art about copyrighted characters because Marvel owns copyright. Therefore, fan art is always against Wikia's TOU but most likely they don't enforce it without a complaint from copyright holder.
- Immaterial laws are such a maze that it's always better to use term copyright infringement instead of legal or illegal.
- Changing gallery type to user gallery on user pages is good. However, editors shouldn't need to protect any fan art galleries on their own pages from deleting. User pages should be private and in this case we don't have any reason to edit them.
- Instructing to license fan art as public domain is just wrong and could be seen from the view of the copyright holder as a sign of bad faith.
- I think that changing the image type of fan art to user image is a wrong decision. Most likely Marvel don't care about our use of fan art but it would be better to do it openly, showing good faith.
- Fair use licensing approves only encyclopediac use. Every image not used in articles and every gallery (even category) are clearly out of its scope. Images should also be as low resolution as possible for the article's need. And even our whole article layout could be challenged as being competitor to handbooks or Marvel's own wiki.
- I don't have fears that Marvel would like to give us any problems but we should acknowledge and respect their rights as a copyright holder.
Few helpful links:
- Fan Art Law at Comic-Con by Josh Wattles on Youtube; Very informative and entertaining presentation about copyright laws, including fair use. I really hope that you can spare time to watch at least first half of it, last half consists of audience questions.
- [1] --- Dan Buckley: We in no way want to interfere with creators at conventions who are providing a positive Marvel experience for our fans. We want fans to speak and interact with the creators who wrote, penciled, inked, lettered, colored or edited their favorite stories. Part of that positive interaction is that a fan can walk away with a signed memento or personalized sketch from an artist.
- [2] --- Comment to that by Sean Murphy.
In case I somehow wasn't clear before, I believe changing the license and image type should only be temporary and is therefore not in bad faith, as it's merely a way to ensure a select few user images aren't unintentionally caught in this purge, and should be reverted once that process is complete.
If our intention is to delete all fan art which isn't actively watched on, it would have been better to just delete tag all and give a notice about our intentions explaining that delete tag could be removed by any editor's discretion. Changing categories back and worth seems excessive.
Tagging 1400+ images is more work than tinkering with what'll end up being likely far less than 10% though, yeah?
No, if tagging is done with a bot.
Actually, that is a really good idea to tag them all with delete and easy to do with the bot.
Should we go ahead and do that?