Uploads From 3rd Party Imageboards

I've noticed something that bothers me a bit. Uploads from other imageboards, not original artist sources.

As of late, yande.re uploads in particular have caught my eye.

Presently, I personally won't upload/approve anything that isn't directly sourced to the original artist. And I don't mean just adding the artist tag. I mean to an original artist upload where the artist them self made their work available to the world. Not a 3rd party imageboard.

Reason being, from a copyright and pure respect perspective I feel to not link directly an the artist's own upload undermines the authenticity and legality of an upload. If the artist them self is given direct link credit so that any viewer on danbooru is able to click the source link and be led to the artist's own posting, proper credit is being given in such a way that it directly benefits the artist by having their works shared and appreciated on danbooru. Not to mention it shows the source was made publicly available by the artist them self in order for the upload to even occur in the first place.

But once you start linking from other 3rd party links, this element of credit and direct advertisement of an artist's works and sites (whether pixiv, twitter, personal homepage, ect) is lost. This quickly becomes very murky water from an ethical standpoint. If we want to be able to defend our sharing of someone else's work sticking to uploading directly from the artist so all due proper credit is given is a very important feature of danbooru that I believe is crucial to the site as a whole.

I looked over upload guidance again to see if this was specifically addressed, but it is not. For that reason I decided to throw this out there as food for thought going forward:

Should there be a rule regarding sourcing to the original artist's post or are 3rd party sites such as yandere.re and chan.sankakucomplex acceptable sources so long as the artist is tagged?
My opinion should be clear, however one opinion means little in a community thus I'm interested in other folks's opinion on the matter.

If a link to a posting of the artist is available, it should be used if at all possible. I always try to find the correct source, even when uploading from a 3rd party site.

If not, such as scans, dead links, or temporary imageboards like 2ch, then I personally don't see an issue with using that material.

The reason being, is that the art which may not be "publicly available" may be the very same art that gets a user interested in that artist in the first place. This would achieve the same affect, as a user interested in that artist could follow the artists links to their websites.

I was planning to draft for something like this later, but as you said, a source link to the artist's work directly (versus an auxiliary imageboard) is best.

Plus, yande.re might do strange things with the image. I think someone said once that they strip metadata from it.

BrokenEagle98 said:

If a link to a posting of the artist is available, it should be used if at all possible. I always try to find the correct source, even when uploading from a 3rd party site.

If not, such as scans, dead links, or temporary imageboards like 2ch, then I personally don't see an issue with using that material.

The reason being, is that the art which may not be "publicly available" may be the very same art that gets a user interested in that artist in the first place. This would achieve the same affect, as a user interested in that artist could follow the artists links to their websites.

This. Yandere is primarily a "highres" distribution site, a lot of which includes scans. I would never source a non-scan from yandere without first tracking back the source to the original if possible. Most, if not all images sourced from yandere will be scans.

However, I have to disagree with you (Tsumanne) that everything should be distributed by the artist first. Artists do not always release all of their art outside of artbooks and magazine scans, much less outside twitter. Sites like yandere and e-h have solid reputations for their scans, and shouldn't be eschewed simply because they aren't the artist's site, and scans are official inasmuch that the artist released that piece of art physically instead of digitally. Yes, it won't look 100% how the artist drew it on their own computer, but that is the expectation when bringing art into a physical medium.

Of course, you can go into a discussion on piracy, but as an Imageboard ourselves, we are already violating many artists' IPs by rehosting their images without their consent, regardless of their being sourced or not. By your logic, Danbooru should only host images that the artist has explicitly allowed to be hosted, which would then render it inferior to Pixiv simply in terms of breadth of content.

To Mikaeri, I'm assuming you're referring to true-digital images, because I don't think it makes sense for a scan to source back to a true-digital image on an entirely different site.

Oh I mean for purely digital images, yup. It's largely what I dabble with (in both uploads and approvals). Scans I find are a different matter when it comes to sourcing.

Mikaeri said:

Oh I mean for purely digital images, yup. It's largely what I dabble with (in both uploads and approvals). Scans I find are a different matter when it comes to sourcing.

Yeah, for true-digital images I'll agree as per my previous post that they should be properly traced back if you can. Of course, the exception to this is digital "scans" of light novels, which can't be gotten hold of without ripping, bought or not.

Have you seen Mikaeri’s suggestion about creating howto:yandere in the wiki requests thread?

Edit: The rest of my post was made superfluous by what other users had said while I was writing it.

Ah, that reminds me I need to finish that up. How would we handle other imageboards though, like sankakucomplex and konachan? What would a good name for a howto page be for those sites? howto:other_imageboards maybe?

I'm of the opinion that it's highly discouraged to upload from those boards unless they are the only sources of an image known (no hits on SauceNAO and no other source link provided). Konachan, especially, is largely just wallpaper modifications of existing images. They might host originals, but those are quite rare, I find.

EDIT: Forgot to mention minitokyo, but minitokyo's fairly similar to yande.re except their collection is a bit more outdated.

Mikaeri said:

Ah, that reminds me I need to finish that up. How would we handle other imageboards though, like sankakucomplex and konachan? What would a good name for a howto page be for those sites? howto:other_imageboards maybe?

I'm of the opinion that it's highly discouraged to upload from those boards unless they are the only sources of an image known (no hits on SauceNAO and no other source link provided). Konachan, especially, is largely just wallpaper modifications of existing images. They might host originals, but those are quite rare, I find.

EDIT: Forgot to mention minitokyo, but minitokyo's fairly similar to yande.re except their collection is a bit more outdated.

Yes, Konachan is, for all intents and purposes, a non-competitor. If you can find it in Kona/Zero, chances are 99%+ that you can find it on Danbooru, yandere, and the other big sites. Sankaku is a bit more complex, they're kind of like a better Gelbooru, but occasionally you'll find scans or patreon/enty images that aren't present anywhere else. I'd say that if you do a reverse image search and can't find anything, then it should be fine to source there.

Minitokyo isn't always outdated, they have a fair few number of dedicated scanners, it's just that they're quickly reposted to yandere within the hour by users who use both sites. Minitokyo also does not allow explicit presence of genitalia, unlike other boards.

The main trustworthy sites are going to be yandere, tokyo, and e-h. Sankaku and some bbs boards are just typical boards with rare original uploads, and imo all other boards should be ignored, because the aforementioned are practically all of the non-pixiv/seiga/nijie/twitter content you'll find.

Edit: Added twitter to my last sentence.

Beware when uploading things from both Yande.re and Sankaku. After a bit researching, I can conclude that some of them are upscaled images using Waifu2x.

Some good arguments and insight. I must say some yande.re post I have recently seen are certainly high quality (thus why I noticed them). The issue of link/ownership is the only issue. To which there have been some fair arguments.

In the event no other source is available and proper tagging is done, I can see that being of benefit both to the artist and danbooru. That's the thing. As long as all parties benefit I don't see a problem.

Typically I avoid uploading/approving artists I have met face-to-face in order to avoid conflict of interest, but I've had an artist I had no connection to thank me through another danbooru user after they recognized I had uploaded their friend's work. The original artist was very happy someone in the international community wanted to share their work. Especially since they were being given full credit. That to me justified sites such as danbooru in how they benefit both artist and the international fan community.

It's that mutually beneficial balance I'd like to keep and I believe danbooru does a better job than most in this regard. Thus why I brought up the topic.

The one thing that really sets Danbooru apart from most is its robust artist (>150K) and wiki (>85K) entries, and the users that diligently upkeep them...

BrokenEagle98 said:

The one thing that really sets Danbooru apart from most is its robust artist (>150K) and wiki (>85K) entries, and the users that diligently upkeep them...

I must certainly agree that Danbooru does these things in a way that sets it apart. Tagging is most well done here. Also, the comments from users are so much more engaged and interesting from what I've encountered elsewhere. But I can't help but also place primacy on Danbooru's copyright policy that isn't considered important elsewhere, which gives Danbooru an ethical edge.

Maybe most don't care so much about this, but as someone who has been personally involved, met many Japanese doujinshi artits (ranging from hobby-amateur to professional), and been a guest of major Japanese animation studios my selling point on this type of site is that we help the original artists by giving them recognition in the international sphere they may not have had otherwise.

Our benefit is their benefit. This is my sales pitch. So hearing justifications for various sources is rather important for me. What Danbooru decides I will uphold and pitch. But the more direct the link, the easier my sales pitch.

CodeKyuubi said:

Of course, the exception to this is digital "scans" of light novels, which can't be gotten hold of without ripping, bought or not.

The vast majority of the time the colour novel illustrations are included in free samples of the volume on the publisher's website/bookwalker/nicoseiga, so could they not be traced back to there?

kuuderes_shadow said:

The vast majority of the time the colour novel illustrations are included in free samples of the volume on the publisher's website/bookwalker/nicoseiga, so could they not be traced back to there?

I just put in the Japanese title into the source (if I got the image myself) so that anyone interested can google search it back to any number of sample websites or the publisher site.

The point I was making with that statement was that, while the files are digital, they can't be directly sourced back to the artist's distribution platform, like it is with pixiv/seiga/nijie/twitter. With those, the artist clearly uploaded the image so that it could be viewed by others, whereas with light novel images it is the publisher using their shared rights (I assume this is the case) to the image to upload samples, where artist permission is assumed but not explicit. And even then, the samples are degraded in resolution and/or quality and the full version was never meant for eyes outside of those paying for the novel, and even then (if you paid), one would still need to rip the image from their site/app, which would be like the equivalent of ripping and uploading music to the internet. In terms of the legality that Tsumanne is championing, I'd say that falls quite far from being legal.

I can see where Tsumanne is coming from, IP is very important, and I'm of the mind that Danbooru is quite thorough in trying to properly attribute artist names and sources to each image where we can, and I personally support the hosting of physical and digital scans that would not otherwise be hosted on the board if the policy was that the artist had to make the full image available to the free public first.

Of course, there's also the matter of many artists using borrowed copyrights when drawing things like Love Live and Touhou, which is a topic I'm not very familiar with, but is a reason (I think) that people use to justify the free use of an artist's work where that applies. IANAL.

CodeKyuubi said:

Of course, there's also the matter of many artists using borrowed copyrights when drawing things like Love Live and Touhou, which is a topic I'm not very familiar with, but is a reason (I think) that people use to justify the free use of an artist's work where that applies. IANAL.

Touhou is a special case because Zun pretty much said “Do whatever you want as long as you don’t claim the characters/world your own. And please don’t make an anime.” (Animes were made anyway, but let’s not go there now.)

In general, all free fan-works clearly created as such are accepted by most copyright holders. I guess they realized that keeping the fans happy is good for sales and free advertising. Disney is the only exception I can think of from the top of my head. They actually bother to send out DMCAs and C&Ds, which is why “depictions” of Disney characters are usually pixellated and the (Japanese) comments mention copyright strikes or the artist being ballsy.

The Japanese actually go further in that they generally allow fan creations being sold for no (or little) profit, just covering the production costs. Otherwise, Comiket would be dead. I’m not sure whether it’s explicitly allowed by law or just a grey area that is generously tolerated because it’s good for sales and keeping the fans happy. I believe that without all the excessive fan-works, KanColle would still be an obscure browser game today, if not axed completely. IIRC, there were plans to outlaw non-profit selling of fan-works in Japan some time ago, but those plans were dropped.

Fan-works of non-commercial original characters are appreciated by most Japanese and many other artists when credit it given because they like seeing that other people like their works. A bit of an exception are the often-ridiculed demands like “original character donot steel!!!1” seen mostly on DeviantArt and similar due to some not-so-nice artists stealing other original characters without giving credit. Seems to be less common nowadays, though.

kittey said:

The Japanese actually go further in that they generally allow fan creations being sold for no (or little) profit, just covering the production costs. Otherwise, Comiket would be dead. I’m not sure whether it’s explicitly allowed by law or just a grey area that is generously tolerated because it’s good for sales and keeping the fans happy. I believe that without all the excessive fan-works, KanColle would still be an obscure browser game today, if not axed completely. IIRC, there were plans to outlaw non-profit selling of fan-works in Japan some time ago, but those plans were dropped.

I believe it's indeed a grey area where copyright holders tolerate what is essentially copyright infringement (especially so in the case of selling merchandise at Comiket & co) because it doesn't harm them in any way and probably even benefits them in the long run.
Much in the same way ZUN's guidelines for fanworks are basically what amounts to "you're allowed to infringe on my copyright under these conditions." - which, for example excludes an officially licensed anime but not small not-for-profit fanimes like the few projects we've seen around.

I upload yandere and sankaku images for stitches/official/promotional arts which doesn't have any public source. (people just scans and uploads them/digital rips).
Would you rather have the source blank?

As for the novel illustrations, most of the time, the images available at dengekibunko/other sites are not full sized. So they can't be uploaded. but I think we should stop linking to novel translation sites as it might cause issues for them.
I do agree that if an image if publicly accessible and has a valid source (not 3rd/4th party imageboards), they should include the original source. There are tools like SauceNao available that can be used to find images from pixiv and such.

toshiya4 said:

I upload yandere and sankaku images for stitches/official/promotional arts which doesn't have any public source. (people just scans and uploads them/digital rips).
Would you rather have the source blank?

No. If you have a source, whatever it may be, leave it in. Just make sure to use sites like SauceNao to find a better source and use that instead if there is one. Even if another image board isn’t a great source, we can still just ignore it, but if you don’t fill in the source, we have no choice anymore. Filling the source in also tells other users that the image didn’t magically fall from the sky.

As for the novel illustrations, most of the time, the images available at dengekibunko/other sites are not full sized. So they can't be uploaded. but I think we should stop linking to novel translation sites as it might cause issues for them.

Issues like what? I can’t think of a reason not to link to them.

kittey said:

No. If you have a source, whatever it may be, leave it in. Just make sure to use sites like SauceNao to find a better source and use that instead if there is one. Even if another image board isn’t a great source, we can still just ignore it, but if you don’t fill in the source, we have no choice anymore. Filling the source in also tells other users that the image didn’t magically fall from the sky.

Issues like what? I can’t think of a reason not to link to them.

Cease and desists that stop translation efforts, most likely. He's referring to Rignak uploading directly from baka-tsuki.