I suggest not banning this until the author submits a complaint.
Posted under General
I remember there being concern that posting Patreon rewards could cause artists with significant portfolios elsewhere to request removal from the board. Would it be possible to selectively ban an artist's patreon reward posts?
Kikimaru said:
At the same time, the artist has already been "paid" for their work; releasing it into the public domain feels like the correct thing to do.
Yeah just like CD albums, right, people certainly aren't sued to oblivion because someone did what they wanted with something they paid for? If you buy a digital good it's just like buying a fish at the market, it's yours now! A nice fantasy, however intellectual property legislation exists and is something you can't wish away.
chinatsu said:
Yeah just like CD albums, right, people certainly aren't sued to oblivion because someone did what they wanted with something they paid for? If you buy a digital good it's just like buying a fish at the market, it's yours now! A nice fantasy, however intellectual property legislation exists and is something you can't wish away.
I can say the same thing for all the game cg, scanned doujins, and scanned artbook images posted here.
chinatsu said:
Yeah just like CD albums, right, people certainly aren't sued to oblivion because someone did what they wanted with something they paid for? If you buy a digital good it's just like buying a fish at the market, it's yours now! A nice fantasy, however intellectual property legislation exists and is something you can't wish away.
From how I understand it though, you don't "buy" any goods through Patreon - you are sponsoring the artist to do their thing, and they release the art as a reward/thank you.
Many (most?) artists treat Patreon as a subscription service where they sell exclusive access to their premium content. It's one thing to repost an artist's freely available art - our party line has always been that that is a victimless crime, and arguably even a service to the artist. Paid content is quite another matter. Piracy directly hurts a small artist's ability to make a living and continue creating art.
Even if you don't care about that, on a purely pragmatic level posting Patreon rewards is practically begging artists to send us takedown requests of all their works.
evazion said:
Even if you don't care about that, on a purely pragmatic level posting Patreon rewards is practically begging artists to send us takedown requests of all their works.
Exactly. That's the point I was trying to make in my previous post.
And while I'm not innocent on this -I've posted the odd Patreon reward here and there- I think it's just too much to upload reward packs en masse and in their entirety, and tagging them as such.
mass update patreon_reward -> -patreon_reward
Probably bad syntax but you get the gist.
EDIT: This bulk update request has been rejected because it was not approved within 60 days.
EDIT: The bulk update request #1187 (forum #131367) has been rejected by @DanbooruBot.
Updated by DanbooruBot
It's caused more problems than the positives it was supposed to bring about. Some users have taken the tag as license to upload an artists whole Patreon collection to the site which is not right. These posts should be an exception to the (unspoken) rule, not carte blanche make like bandits.
To begin with, what is Patreon reward? (Seriously, I don't know)
Currently I'm under perception that patreon reward is a picture(s) that act as the "bonus content" for certain Patreon pack. For example, Fuya's January pack consists of Pic A to Pic E, however Pic E is only accessible / given to the patrons if they are a Tier 2 members. Is it something like that?
Sacriven said:
To begin with, what is Patreon reward? (Seriously, I don't know)
Currently I'm under perception that patreon reward is a picture(s) that act as the "bonus content" for certain Patreon pack. For example, Fuya's January pack consists of Pic A to Pic E, however Pic E is only accessible / given to the patrons if they are a Tier 2 members. Is it something like that?
Yes. Patreon rewards is content that the creator puts out for certain tiers of supporters, and is only accessible at that tier (or higher)
Sometimes it's stuff like .psd or process videos, sometimes it's alternate versions of existing pictures (NSFW versions for example), sometimes it's flat out 100% exclusive art... Depends on the artist and the tier.
It's a multifaceted problem really. There are some artists like Hews_Hack that don't care after a certain period of exclusivity. But the majority of artists, especially those that then go on to post the rewards as purchasable packages from gumroad or the like would obviously prefer that said art not be just available free of charge easily accessible somewhere else.
Granted, it's not that hard to find this stuff with extremely cursory searches. Haganef's stuff for example is almost trivially easy to find. That still doesn't mean that we should make it even easier. It's just that enforcing it isn't easy, and there are valid points that it wouldn't be the first paywalled content to make its way on here by a long shot, just that people tend not to bat an eye at doujinshi and artbooks being uploaded.
This should probably be a case by case issue.
For example, Feguimel has expressed dismay and resignation over the fact that his exclusives were leaked, whereas RiceGnat only offers the highres/PSDs to all art he shares anyway as exclusives. Both these artists regularly post non-exclusive content on their social media/portfolio accounts.
At the same time, Feguimel hopes to make Patreon his primary source of income, whereas RiceGnat has previously stated he thinks of Patreon as a tip jar that has little actual bearing on his livelihood currently.
I know both Sakimichan and Zeronis/Paul Kwon are now both banned here because they sent cease and desists to Danbooru after their Patreon exclusives were leaked. (Which is partially what leads to accusations that Danbooru is a pay to play website, since we never truly delete uploaded works if they aren't broken) Not to mention we've had at least one artist try to use Danbooru to advertise their stuff.
There are arguments about doujinshi and CG sets exclusive to Japan, especially when they're from full companies that won't license their material to the rest of the world anyway. But when we're talking about independent artists trying to make a living on work that they're not posting in public but gets leaked, I think we need to use a lot more discretion.
Basically I think it comes down to this: How much do you value the internet points you get for uploading exclusives? Do you value them enough to risk cease and desist letters from more artists? How exactly do we express our respect for these artists?
Personally, I don't think we should encourage the uploading of patreon exclusives unless the artists themselves are fine with it/don't care that much. Of course, I pledge to several artists to get their exclusives, so I can't say I'm completely unbiased about this. Also I don't think it's a coincidence that users that have argued that everything including the kitchen sink should remain/be included on Danbooru are also arguing that we should include all Patreon exclusives no matter what.
I don't think it would be good to stay on the fence any longer about this kind of topic since we've been getting Patreon rewards uploaded by users either unknowing or intentionally doing it for the easy rewards and nonexistent karma/kudos on this site. Promotion, after all, isn't really measured by any by-numbers standard, and instead is carried out by either Moderators or Admins.
kthxbai said:
This should probably be a case by case issue.
For example, Feguimel has expressed dismay and resignation over the fact that his exclusives were leaked, whereas RiceGnat only offers the highres/PSDs to all art he shares anyway as exclusives. Both these artists regularly post non-exclusive content on their social media/portfolio accounts.
At the same time, Feguimel hopes to make Patreon his primary source of income, whereas RiceGnat has previously stated he thinks of Patreon as a tip jar that has little actual bearing on his livelihood currently.
I know both Sakimichan and Zeronis/Paul Kwon are now both banned here because they sent cease and desists to Danbooru after their Patreon exclusives were leaked. (Which is partially what leads to accusations that Danbooru is a pay to play website, since we never truly delete uploaded works if they aren't broken) Not to mention we've had at least one artist try to use Danbooru to advertise their stuff.Personally, I don't think we should encourage the uploading of patreon exclusives unless the artists themselves are fine with it/don't care that much. Of course, I pledge to several artists to get their exclusives, so I can't say I'm completely unbiased about this. Also I don't think it's a coincidence that users that have argued that everything including the kitchen sink should remain/be included on Danbooru are also arguing that we should include all Patreon exclusives no matter what.
Thing is, if we treat this as a case by case issue we have to basically trust users to follow an etiquette that isn't well-established here yet. Currently, anyone with an old enough account can start uploading to the site as per the usual, and the only users that can permanently purge posts from the database are admins. The fact that as you say, we never 'truly' delete uploaded works, could mean huge trouble for the site in the future where we both turn out as losers.
In the case an artist becomes banned here:
So there are upsides to doing a full-sweep and making patreon reward a 'banned' tag, but that wouldn't necessarily remedy the problem at hand to begin with. It would still make point 2 (and thus 3) valid given the way our banning system works.
There are arguments about doujinshi and CG sets exclusive to Japan, especially when they're from full companies that won't license their material to the rest of the world anyway. But when we're talking about independent artists trying to make a living on work that they're not posting in public but gets leaked, I think we need to use a lot more discretion.
Basically I think it comes down to this: How much do you value the internet points you get for uploading exclusives? Do you value them enough to risk cease and desist letters from more artists? How exactly do we express our respect for these artists?
In full agreement with this. We need to be tougher on users that do upload Patreon rewards, especially without sources and especially without any discretion going into it (going as far as to regularly NOT tagging the artist tag so it isn't banned on sight, etc). But as for any even half-good solution... nothing really comes to mind.
I see DB as both an art vault and a vehicle to promote aspiring artists' works -- having an artist be banned benefits practically no one. It's a particularly sickening thought, but we're already a borderline piracy site -- the only thing separating us between an actual one is perhaps the limited breadth of what we do and the systems present.
As a postscript -- I've talked to Feguimel (he has a smurf here), and he's pretty much on the borderline of being a banned artist -- the only thing stopping him be truly banned is the fact that he still sees value in this site as a vehicle for honest exposure (as I've mentioned before). There will always be users that will try to take advantage of the site, like uploading heavily watermarked images that suggest being their patreon for exclusives, shit like that... but what we should try to do is mitigate that as much as we can, while still retaining the honest artists that understand the nuances of having their work published/curated here.
Updated
As far as practical solutions go, I'm going to restate my suggestion from earlier: Is there any way we could offer partial bans to artists, taking down a limited portion of their artwork automatically (i.e. posts tagged with patreon reward) while leaving the rest intact? I don't know that there's any precedent for such a solution, but it seems like it would be the best possible compromise for both the artist and this community.
Alternatively, since some people in this thread are more morally opposed to Patreon rewards being posted in the first place, we could blacklist the tag by default and add a whitelist for artists who have expressly given permission to reposts.
Some longer thoughts on this situation in general:
I think this whole conversation indicates that we, as a community, need a serious reality check about piracy. People argue that the two aren't comparable, but I firmly believe that we are fundamentally doing the same thing by posting doujinshi and Patreon rewards. The difference is that with the former, we can make excuses like "it won't get licensed anyway", or "it's good for exposure", or even "the artist deserves it for making their work so difficult to get overseas", and because the people we're affecting can't speak our language, we can turn a blind eye to the results. The fact that the conversation is so different when these barriers are removed is very telling.
Tangent incoming, bear with me here... I used to hang out at a site that dealt with doujin CDs, including piracy of them. The same site wanted to reach out to creators and become the #1 global resource for its particular niche. One noticeable problem, though, was that despite its overall size, the community attracted extremely few Japanese creators, and those who joined inevitably left within a couple months. Once I started talking to people with contacts in the Japanese community, I found out why: the site's sweeping excuses for piracy were directly hurting creators (by providing a venue where even Japanese people could pirate the raws), and the practice had given the entire foreign community such a bad name that it had deterred people from selling their works internationally, out of fear that copies would be going directly into pirates' hands. Yet the party line remained that piracy was either neutral or beneficial, and dissenters were treated quite unkindly for disrespecting tradition.
So what about us? We already have a sizeable selection of pirated content, and a relatively large base of Japanese lurkers - much more than most people would assume at first glance. If we restrict the discussion to Patreon artists alone, the question is no longer "Is it acceptable for us to harm artists' livelihoods?", but "How much harm should we be allowed to get away with?". It's definitely not a nice or easy thought, but if we're going to propose a ban based on morality, I feel it's only fair for us to consider what would happen if we took those morals to their logical conclusion.
feline_lump said:
As far as practical solutions go, I'm going to restate my suggestion from earlier: Is there any way we could offer partial bans to artists, taking down a limited portion of their artwork automatically (i.e. posts tagged with patreon reward) while leaving the rest intact? I don't know that there's any precedent for such a solution, but it seems like it would be the best possible compromise for both the artist and this community.
I'm pretty sure this is possible. If I'm not wrong, it's the banned_artist tag that bans images, with artists implicated to the tag. You could simply do the same for reward images, most likely, and have the presence of the tag on upload ban the image, and where the tag is added afterward requested in the post ban thread.
It isn't the solution I like the most from an ethical standpoint, but we should still make it as hard as we can to access patreon rewards, so I would still be in favor of making patreon reward a banned tag even if it's only a temporary solution to the problem. We've dealt with these many times as such anyway.
forum #132297 -- this is definitely an interesting touch, thanks for sharing your input. I'll try to respond more in depth later if I have the time.