RANT

[melannen]

So I was reading a metafandom thread whining how EBUL it is to steal fanart to use in vids without asking permission first!

Part of the grand tradition of "It's all fair use! Unless it's what *I* produce, in which case it's STEELING!" I get *really* sick and tired of hearing that.

I do tend to give somewhat more leeway to fanartists¹ on that, because what they do, at least with books and live-action fandoms, can be more comprehensively transformative than fic tends to be, and also harder to control once it's out there. (And they tend to do more buying and selling, which has *always* puzzled me - as far as I know fanart is no more protected than fic, so why do we buy and sell it when that's anathema for fic? Especially the fanart that's basically direct copies of stills, whether traced or not, but that's a different rant.)

What really got me today is someone I generally respect posting with a comics icon and saying she didn't credit the artist for the icon - which was just a simple crop, no alteration - because that was canon, but it's still horribly bad to not credit all fanartists every time!

What?

I see this fairly often, and it *always* gets me, particularly when people post comics icon bases to share, and insist that *they* get credited for them, but often don't even bother to *name* the penciller or anybody else who worked on the original art. Because *clearly*, scanning and cropping is far more work than producing the art in the first place, and anyway indy comics artists make so much money and have so much name recognition already that they don't need to get paid in whuffie. Right?

(For the record, since JF doesn't have icon comments available yet and I'm too lazy to look up all the credits again anyway, the art in the default icons I've been using lately is by Robbie Rodriguez of Oni Press. And it's made of win. And when I finally get around to posing the iconset to share, I'm going to request that if people credit anyone, they credit the original artists.)

¹and by fanartists I here mean people who draw. People who do only manips are a whole nother kettle of black.

Comments

[kaesa [journalfen.net]]

Ugh. This is why, if I ever make icons of art, I tell people they don't need to credit me but they have to credit the artist. I'm always a little baffled when they want to credit me for some cropping, resizing, and a border. I've never made icons of fanart, but that's mostly because it never really occurs to me to do so.

(Also, I think JF does have icon comments, because I remember filling them in.)

[melannen [journalfen.net]]

Agree. (I know some people put a lot of manip work into icons and I usually think those icons are ugly, and that can be a little different, and I still want a credit to the original.)

And while I don't think I've ever made icons of other people's fanart, I've made a lot of webcomics ones, some from back in the day when the distinction between a webcomic a and fancomic was sometimes not there at all, which I think is part of the reason I'm so sensitive to people making the distinction.

JF has keywords, but I don't like mixing those with credits info. They don't have the separate comments field like LJ, as far as I can tell. Presumably it'll appear with the code update, and I'll have to suck it up and go back and look up the pencillers on every comic book that I stripped for icons.

[kaesa [journalfen.net]]

I like some of the manippy ones, but the other day I found an iconner who had this weird obsession with colorizing B&W and making B&W colorful. Which would have been fine, but she was doing it wrong. Belle looked hungover in B&W, and the sparklies she put in Katharine Hepburn's hair looked like gummi worms.

Weird. I know my icon page has comments as well as keywords.

(Unrelatedly, I also hate when people don't credit their icons just because sometimes I'm struck by a really nice icon and I want to find the source.)

[melannen [journalfen.net]]

Weird. Your icon page *does* have comments. How did you do that? I can't find any way to do that with mine, or anything in the FAQ about it. Am I just being dumb? Can you edit them if you go to the editpics page?

[kaesa [journalfen.net]]

Yup. I just put them in like on LJ. I don't know why you can't, I thought everyone could. I wonder if it's because I'm a n00b. Maybe bring it up at petpeeves?

[melannen [journalfen.net]]

Huh. I think I'm going to ask somewhere, because that's bizarre - I did a quick flist survey, and it's mostly people with high user numbers who have them, but there's a few other old-timers too, so it may not be that simple. Ah, JF!

[melannen [journalfen.net]]

Okay, I asked on ask. Somebody had already questioned the admins; apparently you were right, it is a function of age; you just have to be *much* more of a fossil than I was assuming. (I apparently got in just under the wire. So there's probably less than four thousand journals without it. And I'm one. Yay cabal! :D )

[stellar_dust [journalfen.net]]

Dude, agreed. ARRRRGGH. I just don't *get* that mindset.

*also has comments on JF icons*

[melannen [journalfen.net]]

Apparently it's a newbie thing. And by "newbie" I mean journals less than four years old. :D Ah, tiny user number, such fun we have together.

[lindentreeisle [journalfen.net]]

I'm with you on the bullshit hypocrisy thing.

One thing I did want to mention though; I think the major part of the distinction that's made between using fanart and using canon/pro art from the actual show/comic/what have you is this: when you have work that's recognizably from the original copyrighted work, everyone involved knows that it's not YOUR work, you're just using it. But when you use fanart, there tends to be an inherent assumption (unless you say otherwise) that the fanart is your own. I think what bugs a lot of people is that if a person using the fanart doesn't credit it, the viewers of the new work are probably going to be confused as to its origin and think the fanart was done by the person presenting it as part of their new work. And that rankles; understandably, I think.

That said, I think it's still wrong to use the pro work without crediting. Because there's also the factor of, if you did the work you should get credit for it. But at least with using pro work there's not that implied ownership of the original work.

[lindentreeisle [journalfen.net]]

By "everyone involved knows..." I should clarify that I mean "both the creator and his audience."

[melannen [journalfen.net]]

I can see how some people might think that would work, especially if they're operating only within a fandom where all of the audience might be expected to know all of the canon fairly well. But when you're using an icon from, say, DC comics fandom, where there are hundreds of artists and thousands of books? Or when you're using an icon in a multi-fandom context? I don't see how you can realistically expect everyone to recognize that it's canon and who drew it, just because it was published. Half the time with manga icons I have no clue if it's fanart or not, even if I can recognize the fandom. In fact even in DC comics fandom I'm *more* likely to be able to recognize fanartists by style than I am pro pencillers. And I don't think I'm the only one.

I'm also not sure that most people would assume that the person using a fanart icon is the artist or the owner, even if it's uncredited. In HP fandom, at least, which is where this discussion started, there's a long tradition of people using other people's fanart in icons and moodthemes, to the point where some fanartists are more widely distributed than Mary Grandpre's work is. (The biggest HP fanfic discussion board, in fact, where a lot of people started, has a bunch of default fanart icons that anyone can use, uncredited.) Again I can see how artists might be paranoid about that implication, but I just don't see any evidence that it's *true*, unless the person is making efforts to actively mislead. Even when fanart is put up whole (like as illustrations within a fanfic, or as part of a layout) I doubt most people's first assumption would be that the author also drew the art, if it's unsigned, especially if more than one style is apparent.

It's still necessary to credit if you can! That I don't argue. I still don't agree that there's an automatic distinction between fanart and pro art, though. They should both be credited, because with any reasonably wide audience (and reasonably good quality fanart...) they're equally likely to be misattributed to the poster.