#copyright infringement

[heywriters]

The Fine Line Between Fan Art, Fan Fiction, and Finding Yourself Sued

This whole article is worth a read for fan creators, especially those of you trying to make an honest buck off your work.

(excerpt below)

How Do You Avoid a Lawsuit? Due to the popularity of fan fiction and fan art, many content owners have begun proactively providing guidelines to their fanbase. Wizards of the Coast (Dungeons & Dragons),[6] CBS and Paramount Pictures (Star Trek),[7] and EPIC Games[8] have all developed policies to inform fans of what they can and cannot do legally. Additionally, usually as long as the fan content is non-commercial, it is not a problem with copyright holders. Regardless, unless the work is completely original, fans should be careful about their creations.

Additionally, try to be smarter than this guy who attempted to sue Amazon for the rights to Lord of the Rings.

[rhythmelia]

Support a translator of color!

This is an ongoing situation as of 2023.06.24.

My friend Yilin (she/they) does a lot (A LOT) of work translating literature from Chinese to English, among other things. And they allowed me to signal boost this on tumblr since she doesn't have one yet.

The beginning of the thread is here: https://twitter.com/yilinwriter/status/1670305203206385665 and all the tweet images below are not described because they are previews of direct links to the tweets.

Key points: The British Museum stole their translation work and used it, uncredited, in a major exhibit where they "appeared in photos on a giant display, on signage, in a physical guide, in a digital guide, in an audio guide, and in an app that is available for international download. How did NO ONE catch there was no credit?"

The response from the British Museum has been enormously disappointing so far:

"we will not be reinstating the translations in the exhibition that have been removed following your complaint, and therefore you will not be acknowledged in the exhibition as your work will not be featured" - except the uncredited translations are still in the 30,000 copies of the exhibition catalog.

Go check out more updates downthread as the situation develops.

Want to support Yilin?

"If you want to write to them or have written to the BM, you can help convey these demands of mine to them: - credit + public apology everywhere the work appears - proper payment (increased to account for lack of prior permission given & all the time the work was uncredited)"

Boost Yilin's book! "The Lantern & the Night Moths, an anthology of Chinese poetry that I selected & translated, featuring poets incl. Qiu Jin, accompanied by my essays on translation, forthcoming w/ @/invisibooks in Spring 2024"

Yilin's page: https://yilinwang.com/book-announcement-the-lantern-and-the-night-moths/

and the pre-order link: https://invisiblepublishing.com/product/the-lantern-and-the-night-moths/

I'll try to update as more things happen, or you can go camp out on the thread.

Edit: please reblog the most current update here from 2023.07.05:

[alloalouette]

Incroyable, and holy shit

Twitter’s copyright strike system is no longer working. People are tweeting entire movies.

[thenamelessdoll]

Look at who I found at the local grocery store here in Sweden. :,,,,D

[erenaeoth]

PLUSH BOOKS COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT

I received several comments this morning informing me that one of my fanfictions has been stolen and published for money by a company called "Plush Books". A group of saints on twitter have been helping fic authors who's fics have been stolen, and have been providing information on what to do if you are affected. Please reblog this so that fanfic authors can check if they have been plagarised and learn what to do if they have.

Plush Books have been using FicLabs to download entire fics then upload them and sell them as e-books and paperbacks on multiple different sites including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Abe Books and others.

Twitter user KokomRoily has been calling for help with contacting affected authors and a spread sheet in Google Docs of contacted authors has been made here. You can find the full list of works published by Plush Books here.

KokomRoily provides a good template to use with the Amazon DMCA takedown form (X, text version), which has limited characters, however, you will also need to search other sites too. Other sites have different legal requirements, and I'm copying the template I used here. A good way to find most of the places you need to contact is to look on Good Reads, which lists lots of the marketplaces selling the book.

Make sure you add an author note on the original story stating that this company do not have the rights to publish your fic. I strongly suggest sending this email from the email address that your fic account is registered to, in case you need to provide further evidence. Here is an email template that I put together based on the one above and modified according to the legal demands required on Barnes and Noble's takedown help page:

To whom it may concern,

I affirm under penalty of perjury that I am [YOUR AUTHOR NAME ON YOUR FIC], the author of the work "[YOUR FIC NAME]" posted at [LINK] (entire work) as a free-to-read story. My work has been stolen and published and you are currently listing the work as for sale at the following location [LINK ON MARKETPLACE] as "[BOOK NAME]" by Plush Books.

Under statute 17 USC 512, [MARKETPLACE] has a legal obligation to take down Plush Books' "[BOOK NAME]" in response to a valid DMCA takedown notice by the author. According to this statute, if "[BOOK NAME]" is not taken down, you are making [MARKETPLACE] liable to be sued. Please check with a manager to verify.

I will not be filling in my contact information such as home number and address and I am not required to do so in order for my claim to be valid. I have written in the author's note section of my story that I have not given Plush Books permission to use my work, which is proof enough that Plush Books has stolen the work from someone. If you would like more proof, I can email you screenshots of comments/kudos I've received from my readers from [DATE], the original date of publication, that are still in my inbox.

I have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law. The information in the notification is accurate, and I swear, under penalty of perjury, that I am the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

Please take ""[BOOK NAME]"" down.

Sincerely,

[YOUR AUTHOR NAME ON YOUR FIC]

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[odette0803]

Alt: Reddit comment from u/Charming Scratch_538

No LMFAO. You do actually own your fanfic because you wrote it. You just don't own the character you use or the world you set it in.

Think of like the Simpsons cartoon. If they include Mickey Mouse, Disney can sue because they own Mickey (and Disney DOES sue Ima), but the Simpsons continues to own that episode. The show is still theirs. They wrote it, produced it, etc, but profits off that episode have to be shared with Disney should Disney win the lawsuit. (I wrote that then remembered Disney owns fox now but pls ignore that fact I forgot LOL)

With you and your fanfic, you own the work you created. If you make profit off it, that has to go to the original author/creator of the thing, but that's only if you make profit. It's why ao3 is so anti-profiting off fanfiction. The profit is the problem. Without profit you are the copyright owner of your work, regardless of if the characters are fully original.

Also it being "public domain" is entirely horseshit. If it's not yours it would belong to the original creator, NOT the public domain this person is just stupid all around.

[puraiuddo]

So by popular demand here is my own post about

and why

This case will not affect fanwork.

The actual legal complaint that was filed in court can be found here and I implore people to actually read it, as opposed to taking some rando's word on it (yes, me, I'm some rando).

The Introductory Statement (just pages 2-3) shouldn't require being fluent in legalese and it provides a fairly straightforward summary of what the case is aiming to accomplish, why, and how.

That said, I understand that for the majority of people 90% of the complaint is basically incomprehensible, so please give me some leeway as I try to condense 4 years of school and a 47 page legal document into a tumblr post.

To abbreviate to the extreme, page 46 (paragraph 341, part d) lays out exactly what the plaintiffs are attempting to turn into law:

"An injunction [legal ruling] prohibiting Defendants [AI] from infringing Plaintiffs' [named authors] and class members' [any published authors] copyrights, including without limitation enjoining [prohibiting] Defendants from using Plaintiff's and class members' copyrighted works in "training" Defendant's large language models without express authorization."

That's it. That's all.

This case is not even attempting to alter the definition of "derivative work" and nothing in the language of the argument suggests that it would inadvertently change the legal treatment of "derivative work" going forward.

I see a lot of people throwing around the term "precedent" in a frenzy, assuming that because a case touches on a particular topic (eg “derivative work” aka fanart, fanfiction, etc) somehow it automatically and irrevocably alters the legal standing of that thing going forward.

That’s not how it works.

What's important to understand about the legal definition of "precedent" vs the common understanding of the term is that in law any case can simultaneously follow and establish precedent. Because no two cases are wholly the same due to the diversity of human experience, some elements of a case can reference established law (follow precedent), while other elements of a case can tread entirely new ground (establish precedent).

The plaintiffs in this case are attempting to establish precedent that anything AI creates going forward must be classified as "derivative work", specifically because they are already content with the existing precedent that defines and limits "derivative work".

The legal limitations of "derivative work", such as those dictating that only once it is monetized are its creators fair game to be sued, are the only reason the authors can* bring this to court and seek damages.

*this is called the "grounds" for a lawsuit. You can't sue someone just because you don't like what they're doing. You have to prove you are suffering "damages". This is why fanworks are tentatively "safe"—it's basically impossible to prove that Ebony Dark'ness Dementia is depriving the original creator of any income when she's providing her fanfic for free. On top of that, it's not worth the author’s time or money to attempt to sue Ebony when there's nothing for the author to monetarily gain from a broke nerd.

Pertaining to how AI/ChatGPT is "damaging" authors when Ebony isn't and how much of an unconscionable difference there is between the potential profits up for grabs between the two:

Page 9 (paragraphs 65-68) detail how OpenAI/ChatGPT started off as a non-profit in 2015, but then switched to for-profit in 2019 and is now valued at $29 Billion.

Pages 19-41 ("Plaintiff-Specific Allegations") detail how each named author in the lawsuit has been harmed and pages 15-19 ("GPT-N's and ChatGPT’s Harm to Authors") outline all the other ways that AI is putting thousands and thousands of other authors out of business by flooding the markets with cheap commissions and books.

The only ethically debatable portion of this case is the implications of expanding what qualifies as "derivative work".

However, this case seems pretty solidly aimed at Artificial Intelligence, with very little opportunity for the case to establish precedent that could be used against humans down the line. The language of the case is very thorough in detailing how the specific mechanics of AI means that it copies* copywritten material and how those mechanics specifically mean that anything it produces should be classified as "derivative work" (by virtue of there being no way to prove that everything it produces is not a direct product of it having illegally obtained and used** copywritten material).

*per section "General Factual Allegations" (pgs 7-8), the lawsuit argues that AI uses buzzwords ("train" "learn" "intelligence") to try to muddy how AI works, but in reality it all boils down to AI just "copying" (y'all can disagree with this if you want, I'm just telling you what the lawsuit says)

**I see a lot of people saying that it's not copyright infringement if you're not the one who literally scanned the book and uploaded it to the web—this isn't true. Once you "possess" (and downloading counts) copywritten material through illegal means, you are breaking the law. And AI must first download content in order to train its algorithm, even if it dumps the original content nano-seconds later. So, effectively, AI cannot interact with copywritten material in any capacity, by virtue of how it interacts with content, without infringing.

Now that you know your fanworks are safe, I'll provide my own hot take 🔥:

Even if—even if—this lawsuit put fanworks in jeopardy... I'd still be all for it!

Why? Because if no one can make a living organically creating anything and it leads to all book, TV, and movie markets being entirely flooded with a bunch of progressively more soulless and reductive AI garbage, what the hell are you even going to be making fanworks of?

But, no, actually because the dangers of AI weaseling its way into every crevice of society with impunity is orders of magnitude more dangerous and detrimental to literal human life than fanwork being harder to access.

Note to anyone who chooses to interact with this post in any capacity: Just be civil!

[ebookporn]

Fanfiction Community Rocked By Etsy Sellers Turning Their Work Into Bound Books

by Samantha Cole

Example of a bound fanfiction book from one of the now-deleted listings on Etsy. - screenshot via 404 Media

Etsy sellers are turning free fanfiction into printed and bound physical books, and listing them for sale on online marketplaces for more than $100 per book. It’s a problem that’s rattling the authors of those fanfics, as well as their fans and readers. 

Several sellers, easily found on Etsy and very popular, each with hundreds of five-star reviews, are selling copies of fanfiction taken from sites like Archive of Our Own (Ao3) and reselling them as bound books. The average price of these bound copies is around $149. Some sellers claim that they’re simply covering the cost of materials, while others just sell the books, usually with the fanfiction writers’ Ao3 username on the cover.

This is hitting the “Dramione” fandom—which pairs Hermoine and Draco from the Harry Potter series—particularly hard, because this type of fanfic is extremely popular on Etsy. “All the Young Dudes,” a massively popular Harry Potter fanfic by MsKingBean89, is being sold by multiple sellers, including one that mostly sells bamboo and rattan handicrafts. “Manacled” by SenLiYu is another wildly popular one that’s been turned into merch and bound books on Etsy.  

Some authors are deleting their works from the internet altogether to prevent book binding resellers stealing them. 

READ MORE

[corvuserpens]

Oh yeah, and then there's THIS problem.

@support @staff What will you do about people who post someone else's art without their consent? How are we gonna get them to opt-out of letting data scrappers use their posts for AI training if they post our art without permission?

This is so daft on so many levels jfc.

(Original tweet by @katriaraden)

[mudwerks]

(via Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement. - The Verge)

Comedian and author Sarah Silverman, as well as authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey — are suing OpenAI and Meta each in a US District Court over dual claims of copyright infringement.

The suits alleges, among other things, that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA were trained on illegally-acquired datasets containing their works, which they say were acquired from “shadow library” websites like Bibliotik, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and others, noting the books are “available in bulk via torrent systems.”

this will be interesting

[rhythmelia]

Support a Translator of Color (1 day left of Crowd Justice fundraising!)

Fresh post for the tags! As I've shared extensively in updates on this post since 2023.06.24, my friend Yilin Wang (yilinwriter on twitter) has had their translation work stolen and used uncredited by the British Museum in a major exhibit on The Hidden Century in Chinese history that featured major feminist revolutionary Qiu Jin, and when called out on that behavior, the museum chose to remove Qiu Jin's poetry and Yilin's translation, silencing both of them. Instead of, yanno, naming the translator and giving appropriate credit and payment. ....yup.

So! Here's the Crowd Justice:

Case updates can be found at that fundraiser (especially as the muskrat has made twitter into an epic trashfire at the moment) but some key points, in Yilin's words:

I need to raise at least £15,000 by July 10th to enable me to instruct expert lawyers in London to initiate a claim of infringement of my copyright and moral rights. I will be working with lawyers in the UK to bring a claim against the British Museum for its infringement of my copyright and moral rights in the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (IPEC), which is a specialist court and part of the Business and Property Courts of the High Court of Justice in London. ......

Please contribute and share if you can - each and every small contribution is very much appreciated! Let’s hold the British Museum accountable together!  I realise that this is a lot of money at any time, and especially in the current economic circumstances, but the cost and difficulty of taking legal action is a huge barrier when it comes to access to justice. My hope is that if I am able to generate enough support to take this point of principle forward, it will give the British Museum and all similar institutions the maximum possible incentive to avoid similar conduct in the future, because they will see that there is collective power in communities who feel disrespected and insulted. .....

Why This Case Matters This case matters to me not only because I believe both my work and Qiu Jin's work should receive the credit and respect they deserve, but because it affects the copyright and moral rights of all translators, writers, and creatives. 

The British Museum has not issued an appropriate apology or taken proper responsibility for its actions, so if it is not held accountable, then this is a cycle that stands to be repeated.

Yilin was able to make the minimum to retain a lawyer, and is now working towards the stretch goal. Here's part of the statement from the lawyer on the crowd justice page:

Accordingly, it is not giving anything away to say that we sincerely hope that the British Museum come to recognise the shortcomings in their conduct so far, and move to make amends rather than fight Yilin all the way. We will make Yilin’s funds go as far as we can, but there is a real prospect of the case being drawn out beyond the funding she has available, so it continues to be the case that every pound she raises towards her stretch targets puts her in the strongest possible position - a position that the British Museum has extensive visibility of - to hold out for what she deserves with help of expert legal assistance.

Currently it's at £16,722 pledged towards the stretch target of £20,000 from 573 pledges in small amount donations. Help Yilin be able to keep going if the British Museum continues to behave badly and try to fight until Yilin's out of funds. Please consider reblogging and/or donating a small amount if you can - about 1 day left to July 10! (I'm in UTC-7 and it's the 8th for me but I'm not sure what timezone the fundraiser site is in, since it says 1 day left there)

tagging @copperbadge, @vaspider and @prismatic-bell on the off chance they might be interested in signal boosting? No pressure though!

[kingmystrie]

I cannot stress enough that fair use does not, and never has protected works of art at all. Period. Point blank. Never has.

You basically only get to use fair use if you're criticising a piece of media. Parody is defined so specifically that section is a joke.

Your fanart and fanfic does not fall under fair use. They just cant do anything about it because nobodys really profiting from it so they can't say you're hurting profits. That's why AO3 won't let you make posts regarding money and stuff.

Stop making the assumption that laws are always just, the law only supports the hoarding of capital, that includes capitalizing the creativity of our brains.

[sessakag]

PSA! Leech Alert!

There is a bottom feeder amongst us, fanfic writers and readers, this creature here is stealing work from other authors and placing it behind a paywall on patreon currently with 210 subs at $10 dollars a pop. Needless to say I'm more than a little ticked to discover my own fic Secrets of the Hidden Leaf was added yesterday. I've filed a DMCA claim, and reported their page. Please take a look to see if your work, or someone else you know's work is up there and report them so this leech can be shut down.

FYI: this was brought to my attention by Project Copy-Knight. They have an option for authors to opt in for automatic alerts when someone is stealing your work. This is their discord if you have questions. Opt-in option to receive automatic alerts when someone is leeching off of you. Spreadsheet of stolen works.

[makiruz]

Everyone's "Be Gay Do Crimes" until you have to do actual crimes and everyone chickens out and calls the cops

[sheydgarden]

someone on redbubble by the name of "heather-richard" stole your "goth jew" design

thank you very much for the tip - a quick search turned up 2 other accounts selling the same ripped design. unfortunately this is far from the first time - these scraper accounts (filled with nothing but completely unrelated stolen artwork, very easily identifiable!) are a plague & are part of the reason i no longer have a Redbubble shop myself.

i'll continue to file takedown notices whenever someone lets me know they've seen one - PSA/reminder that the only place you can currently buy shirts from me is my Threadless shop.