#fanwork theft

[cacodaemonia]

This is mostly a question for folks I know or have interacted with, so I'm hoping it doesn't break containment and get me screamed at by randos, but I see posts like this one sometimes and just... really hope people aren't downloading and making copies of my fics and art without permission??

I know it's a tricky subject and I'm very much in favor of AO3, Open Doors, and other fanworks archives. Fandom is a part of culture. It's important to study, and it's also great for people to be able to reread (and re-look at/listen to) their favorite fanworks.

I also realize that once you've put something on the internet, you no longer have any control over it.

However, this recent push to download and makes copies of others' fanworks edges a little too close to art theft for my liking.

As someone who's been making fanart since the 90s, I've had my images stolen more times than I can count. And while it's worse when other people use it to make money, it also REALLY REALLY sucks when they pass it around with little or no credit given, talking amongst themselves and never saying anything nice to me about it. I've had people do this in Discord servers, on Tumblr, AO3, Instagram, tiktok, Twitter, Pinterest, and doubtless other social media. In my opinion, all of that is art theft.

Fan creators have the right to delete their works—hell, I deleted all of my art from Tumblr years ago and have also deleted lots of older images from AO3. Yes, I could orphan them, but then I would lose all control over them, which is the opposite of what I want (I know that deleting them from Tumblr only removes them from my account, but that was the best I could do). If I delete something from AO3, I think it goes without saying that I don't want other people distributing copies they might have made of it. And I don't think that's unreasonable?? But I've seen numerous cases where fan creators have deleted something, and then other people start passing around files of the works, which just seems deeply wrong to me?

Another reason I personally don't like it when people copy my works without permission is because I edit my published fics and art sometimes. So if someone downloads them rather than going to my AO3—where they might be more likely to let me know they actually liked the thing—they'll never see any improvements or changes I might have made. Honestly, I wish it was possible to entirely turn off the 'download' button on all of my works just to make it a little harder to copy them (yes, I realize this would make it so Calibre doesn't work, but I think AO3's efforts to block spam and ai scrapers means that Calibre doesn't work anyway, so 🤷).

I do think fanbinding is a bit different, because the person using your work is making another fanwork out of it. It's transformative. They're not just printing it on shitty paper and stuffing it in a binder without asking your permission first—that's not transformative.

Anyway, idk, it's a tricky and nuanced subject. But I think the bare minimum that people can do before they copy someone's fanworks is to ask them for permission?? Isn't that what permissions statements are for? Even blanket permission is generally only meant to let others makes transformative works based on your works. I've never seen anyone say "yeah feel free to copy my stuff word-for-word or pixel-by-pixel and do whatever you want with it for all time." And that's basically what posts like the one I linked to above are suggesting.

So idk, what do y'all think?

[captainjonnitkessler]

I'm going to become extremely anti-AI but for digital art

"You don't even mix your own colors? The computer just generates whatever color you want? Don't call yourself an artist if you aren't going to put in the work to make your own colors."

"So you click this button and it automatically fills in the whole area with color? Look at this painting and how the brushstrokes are layered so carefully to create shading and texture. A bucket tool can't replicate the human intention that goes into a real painting."

"I can't believe the internet is so flooded with all this digital "art". You can't even find a real oil painting or a pencil sketch anymore, it's just all this computer-made bullshit that people just threw together in Procreate"

"You drew a picture of SOMEONE ELSE'S character? That is LITERAL THEFT! They didn't consent to you using their art like this! I can't wait for the government to crack down on using other people's IP, it's absolutely disgusting that you can just steal someone else's work like this. Only a talentless techbro hack would think that plagiarizing someone else's character could be art."

[ekingston]

SO HERE IS THE WHOLE STORY (SO FAR).

I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people down senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.

IN SHORT

Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.

When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media posts—using 

his dyslexia; 

his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; and 

a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a ‘valid’ claim,

as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.

When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his ‘apologies’ as well as his website (allegedly—it’s possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasn’t any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer there. 

THE TAKEAWAYS

1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain; 

2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, and 

3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but they’re NOT DELETED from Weitzman’s servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors' permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again. 

THE TIMELINE, THE DETAILS, THE SCREENSHOTS (behind the cut)

Sunday night, December 22nd 2024, I noticed an influx in visitors to my fic You & Me & Holiday Wine. When I searched the title online, hoping to find out where they came from, a new listing popped up (third one down, no less):

This listing is still up today, by the way, though now when you follow the link to word-stream, it just brings you to the main site. (Also, to be clear, this was not the cause for the influx of traffic to my fic; word-stream did not link back to the original work anywhere.)

I followed the link to word-stream, where to my horror Y&M&HW was listed in its entirety—though, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywall—along with a link promising to take me—through an app downloadable on the Apple Store—to an AI-narrated audiobook version. When I searched word-stream itself for my ao3 handle I found both of my multi-chapter fics were listed this way:

Because the tags on my fics (which included genres* and characters, but never the original IPs**) weren’t working, I put ‘Kara Danvers’ into the search bar and discovered that many more supercorp fics (Supergirl TV fandom, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor pairing) were listed.

I went looking online for any mention of word-stream and AI plagiarism (the covers—as well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratings—made it immediately obvious that AI fuckery was involved), but found almost nothing: only one single Reddit post had been made, and it received (at that time) only a handful of upvotes and no advice. 

I decided to make a tumblr post to bring the supercorp fandom up to speed about the theft. I draw as well as write for fandom and I’ve only ever had to deal with art theft—which has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was reposted—and I was at a loss regarding where to start in this situation.

After my post went up I remembered Project Copy Knight, which is worth commending for the work they’ve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobook’ YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if they’d heard of this site and whether they could advise me on how to get our works taken down.

While waiting for a reply I looked into Copy Knight’s methods and decided to contact OTW’s legal department:

And then I went to bed.

By morning, tumblr friends @makicarn and @fazedlight as well as a very helpful tumblr anon had seen my post and done some very productive sleuthing:

@echoekhi had also gotten back to me, advising me, as expected, to contact the OTW. So I decided to sit tight until I got a response from them.

That response came only an hour or so later: 

Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointing—I doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasn’t eager to share my given name and personal information with Cliff Weitzman himself, which is unavoidable if you want to file a DMCA.

I decided to take it to Reddit, hoping it would gain traction in the wider fanfic community, considering so many fandoms were affected. My Reddit posts (with the updates at the bottom as they were emerging) can be found here and here.

A helpful Reddit user posted a guide on how users could go about filing a DMCA against word-stream here (to wobbly-at-best results)

A different helpful Reddit user signed up to access insight into word-streams pricing. Comment is here.

Smells unbelievably scammy, right? In addition to those audacious prices—though in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for free—my dyscalculia is screaming silently at the sight of that completely unnecessary amount of intentionally obscured numbers.

Speaking of which! As soon as the post on r/AO3—and, as a result, my original tumblr post—began taking off properly, sometime around 1 pm, jumpscare! A notification that a tumblr account named @cliffweitzman had commented on my post, and I got a bit mad about the gist of his message :

Fortunately he caught plenty of flack in the comments from other users (truly you should check out the comment section, it is extremely gratifying and people are making tremendously good points), in response to which, of course, he first tried to both reiterate and renegotiate his point in a second, longer comment (which I didn’t screenshot in time so I’m sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):

which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit user’s screenshot, I didn’t see it at all, the notifications were moving too fast for me to follow by then)

... where he got a roughly equal amount of righteously furious replies. (Check downthread, they're still there, all the way at the bottom.)

After which Cliff went ahead & deleted his messages altogether. 

It’s not entirely clear whether his account was suspended by Reddit soon after or whether he deleted it himself, but considering his tumblr account is still intact, I assume it’s the former. He made a handful of sock puppet accounts to play around with for a while, both on Reddit and Tumblr, only one of which I have a screenshot of, but since they all say roughly the same thing, you’re not missing much:

And then word-stream started throwing a DNS error.

That lasted for a good number of hours, which was unfortunately right around the time that a lot of authors first heard about the situation and started asking me individually how to find out whether their work was stolen too. I do not have that information and I am unclear on the perimeters Weitzman set for his AI scraper, so this is all conjecture: it LOOKS like the fics that were lifted had three things in common:

They were completed works;

They had over several thousand kudos on AO3; and

They were written by authors who had actively posted or updated work over the past year.

If anyone knows more about these perimeters or has info that counters my observation, please let me know!

I finally thought to check/alert evil Twitter during this time, and found out that the news was doing the rounds there already. I made a quick thread summarizing everything that had happened just in case. You can find it here.

I went to Bluesky too, where fandom was doing all the heavy lifting for me already, so I just reskeeted, as you do, and carried on.

Sometime in the very early evening, word-stream went back up—but the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***

That’s when several users—the ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that way—reported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.

Sooo—

We’re obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they aren’t actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasn’t willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them. 

This was my final edit on my Reddit post before turning off notifications, and it's pretty much where my head will be at for at least the foreseeable future:

Please feel free to add info in the comments, make your own posts, take whatever action you want to take to protect your work. I only beg you—seriously, I’m on my knees here—to not give up like I saw a handful of people express the urge to do. Keep sharing your creative work and remain vigilant and stay active to make sure we can continue to do so freely. Visit your favorite fics, and the ones you’ve kept in your ‘marked for later’ lists but never made time to read, and leave kudos, leave comments, support your fandom creatives, celebrate podficcers and support AO3. We created this place and it’s our responsibility to keep it alive and thriving for as long as we possibly can.

Also FUCK generative AI. It has NO place in fandom spaces.

THE 'SMALL' PRINT (some of it in all caps):

*Weitzman knew what he was doing and can NOT claim ignorance. One, it’s pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you don’t steal some other kid’s art project and present it as your own only to act surprised when they protest and then tell the victim that they should have told you sooner that they didn’t want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so it’s clear he was at least familiar enough with the legalities to not get himself in hot water with corporate lawyers. Fucking over fans, though, he figured he could get away with that. 

**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: it’s even greasier than it looks at first glance. It’s not just the method he used to lift works off AO3 and then regurgitate onto his own website and app. Looking beyond the untold horrors of his AI-generated cover ‘art’, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that can’t be gleaned from their summaries alone. In addition, my fics (and I assume the others, as well) were listed with generated genres; tags that did not appear anywhere in or on my fic on AO3 and were sometimes scarily accurate and sometimes way off the mark. I remember You & Me & Holiday Wine had ‘found family’ (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, ‘enemies to friends to lovers’ and ‘love triangle’ (both wildly inaccurate). Even worse, not all the fic listed (as authors on Reddit pointed out) came with their original summaries at all. Often the entire summary was AI-generated. All of these things make it very clear that it was an all-encompassing scrape—not only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzman’s needs. This means our work was literally fed to this AI to basically do with whatever its other users want, including (one assumes) text generation. 

***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but I’m hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-stream’s search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, don’t have a huge budget or a legal team with oceans of time to fight these battles for them. If you consider yourself an author in the broader sense, beyond merely existing online as a fandom author, beyond concerns that your own work is immediately at risk, DO NOT STOP MAKING NOISE ABOUT THIS.

PLEASE check my later versions of this post via my main page to make sure you have the latest version of this post before you reblog. All the information I’ve been able to gather is in my reblogs below, and it's frustrating to see the old version getting passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.

Thank you all so much!

[echoekhi]

I’m Declaring War Against “What If” Videos: Project Copy-Knight

What Are “What If” Videos?

These videos follow a common recipe: A narrator, given a fandom (usually anime ones like My Hero Academia and Naruto), explores an alternative timeline where something is different. Maybe the main character has extra powers, maybe a key plot point goes differently. They then go on and make up a whole new story, detailing the conflicts and romance between characters, much like an ordinary fanfic.

Except, they are fanfics. Actual fanfics, pulled off AO3, FFN and Wattpad, given a different title, with random thumbnail and background images added to them, narrated by computer text-to-speech synthesizers.

They are very easy to make: pick a fanfic, copy all the text into a text-to-speech generator, mix the resulting audio file with some generic art from the fandom as the background, give it a snappy title like “What if Deku had the Power of Ten Rings”, photoshop an attention-grabbing thumbnail, dump it onto YouTube and get thousands of views.

In fact, the process is so straightforward and requires so little effort, it’s pretty clear some of these channels have automated pipelines to pump these out en-masse. They don’t bother with asking the fic authors for permission. Sometimes they don’t even bother with putting the fic’s link in the description or crediting the author. These content-farms then monetise these videos, so they get a cut from YouTube’s ads.

In short, an industry has emerged from the systematic copyright theft of fanfiction, for profit.

Project Copy-Knight

Since the adversaries almost certainly have automated systems set up for this, the only realistic countermeasure is with another automated system. Identifying fanfics manually by listening to the videos and searching them up with tags is just too slow and impractical.

And so, I came up with a simple automated pipeline to identify the original authors of “What If” videos.

It would go download these videos, run speech recognition on it, search the text through a database full of AO3 fics, and identify which work it came from. After manual confirmation, the original authors will be notified that their works have been subject to copyright theft, and instructions provided on how to DMCA-strike the channel out of existence.

I built a prototype over the weekend, and it works surprisingly well:

On a randomly-selected YouTube channel (in this case Infinite Paradox Fanfic), the toolchain was able to identify the origin of half of the content. The raw output, after manual verification, turned out to be extremely accurate. The time taken to identify the source of a video was about 5 minutes, most of those were spent running Whisper, and the actual full-text-search query and Levenshtein analysis was less than 5 seconds.

The other videos probably came from fanfiction websites other than AO3, like fanfiction.net or Wattpad. As I do not have access to archives of those websites, I cannot identify the other ones, but they are almost certainly not original.

Armed with this fantastic proof-of-concept, I’m officially declaring war against “What If” videos. The mission statement of Project Copy-Knight will be the elimination of “What If” videos based on the theft of AO3 content on YouTube.

I Need Your Help

I am acutely aware that I cannot accomplish this on my own. There are many moving parts in this system that simply cannot be completely automated – like the selection of YouTube channels to feed into the toolchain, the manual verification step to prevent false-positives being sent to authors, the reaching-out to authors who have comments disabled, etc, etc.

So, if you are interested in helping to defend fanworks, or just want to have a chat or ask about the technical details of the toolchain, please consider joining my Discord server. I could really use your help.

------

See full blog article and acknowledgements here: https://echoekhi.com/2023/11/25/project-copy-knight/

[koushirouizumi]

If these two people could remove my Meiko gif on the first time of me asking it then @bossarmadimon can TOO.

(Both of these were re-blogs of alpaca-clouds' post with the gif on.)

[tacky-tramp]

An open letter to the Organization for Transformative Works' legal team:

Dear @transformativeworks Legal,

I am requesting that you take action on Speechify/WordStream's wholesale theft of non-commercial fanworks for commercial purposes.

As you are probably aware, Speechify, an app that uses AI voices to turn user-supplied text into audiobooks, has created a spinoff app called WordStream. WordStream has scraped many, many works of fanfiction from AO3, and has published AI-generated audiobooks of these fics. They charge users for access to these audiobooks, under a subscription model. Not only has this company, run by Cliff Weitzman, violated AO3 users' copyrights, it has done so for profit.

I understand that only authors themselves can file DMCA takedown notices when their fics are stolen. However, there are steps the OTW can take on this matter:

1. Notify all AO3 users via email that their work may have been stolen, and give them next steps. This is what companies are required to do in the event of a data breach, and that's effectively what this is.

2. Publish a blog post about WordStream's theft, and promote it on social media.

3. Send a letter to Speechify, educating them about fanfiction and copyright. Explain that fanfiction is *not* in the public domain, and therefore the users whose work they've stolen have legal recourse against them. Demand they take down all fanfiction they have stolen.

4. Reach out through your networks in tech and publishing to raise awareness of this and marshall support for a campaign to pressure Speechify to remove all fanfiction they posted without author permission.

I am a former OTW volunteer, and I would be happy to assist with any of this!

Thanks,

tacky_tramp

[toskarin]

I feel a little twinge in my heart every time someone decides to describe doujin culture as "theft" when that's exactly what needs to be pushed back against. it is seen as theft by the law, and japan's intellectual property laws are brutal, but you need to be actively denying that premise as hard as you can if you believe even a little bit that these things should continue to exist

this isn't just an "east vs west culture" thing: this is also how fanworks exist outside of japan in almost every case. secondary works exist along the thin line of "this is definitely illegal" and "this would forever tarnish our reputation for trying to enforce it"

posting as activism is rarely worthwhile, but it's easy to forget that copyright is just as much a cultural issue as it is a law-as-written one. the way you talk about fanworks can contribute to swinging the tide of public opinion, which as it stands is the only thing that actually allows pushback against copyright

or, to put it another way, IP law generally being understood to mean something doesn't actually change it, but it often does result in it being untenable for a company's reputation to actually enforce IP law, for fear of breaking a taboo

[buckevantommy]

just a heads up: @h50europe has their asks turned off + replies turned off while reposting other peoples' gifs with that shitty af "credit to the owner" bs in the caption with no link or mention of the gifmakers. i don't make gifs but i fucking HATE this behaviour, the idea that somehow those are the magic fucking words to get away with theft and laziness in a fandom space where attribution is everything especially with the decline in people reblogging fanworks not just scrolling and maybe liking - we don't need to add reposted fanworks to the shitfuck that is tumblr these days. use the gif library ffs or at the very least link the og post you took those gifs from and mention the gifmaker, or else make your own fucking gifs.

[hanahaki4hanami]

Hanahaki for Hanami Prompts!

It's time to grab your picnic basket because flower viewing season is upon us. This way you can collect all the flower petals that come falling out of your mouth. Hanahaki for Hanami will run from April 1st - 30th and it is back with four new flowery prompts.

💮PROMPTS:💮

💮Week One: Hollyhock (Ambition) 💮Week Two: Aster (Symbol of Love, Daintiness) 💮Week Three: Belladonna [Deadly Nightshade] (Silence) 💮Week Four: White Clover (Think of Me)

Use as many or as few prompts as you like. All original or fanworks accepted as long as they are hanahaki-themed.

💢The use of generative-AI, art theft, and plagiarism will not be tolerated.💢

Post to Bluesky, Tumblr, or AO3 and use the tag #hanahaki4hanami or #h4h and tag the account to share! And check out the full event details!

[wlwdcchampionship]

introducing: poll stealing!!

Are you worried about your favorites not making it to the next round? Do you wish you could commit legal poll theft?? Then you’re in luck! Starting in round two, you can make fanworks of any kind to help swing the votes in your ship’s favor! Fics! Art! Playlists! Anything your heart desires!

With the steal function in place, your ship could lose the popular vote but still advance to the next round.

To be very very clear, the purpose of the steal function and the purpose of the tournament as a whole is to get more f/f dc works out there!

Detailed guidelines below the cut:

HOW IT WORKS:

(Disclaimer that the rules and calculations are taken from @lesmisshippingshowdown who in turn were inspired by @hbowartournament)

For all steal works regardless of type, please ensure that you follow these submission guidelines:

Make a new post here on Tumblr including either your fanwork or a link to your work on the relevant platform (AO3, Spotify, etc.) and tag it #wlwdc steal

@ mention this blog (@wlwdcchampionship) in your caption.

Send me an ask or DM with a link to your post. If using asks, please be sure to break up the hyperlink to reduce the chance of Tumblr eating the post.

Now on to specific scoring guidelines for different fanwork categories (once again, thanks to the mods of the LMSS for figuring all this out!):

Writers:

Post a fic (or new chapter) of at least 100 words to AO3. The pairing of your choice must be the primary relationship tag (and remember this poll is for romantic relationships only)

Link your fic here, tag it #wlwdc steal, and send us a link to the post. If your piece is part of a larger, previously established fic, please include in your message the word count of the new chapter.

Earn 0.1% for every 100 words, rounded to the nearest hundred

Artists:

Post your fanart to tumblr, tag it #wlwdc steal, and send us a link.

Earn 0.1% for a sketch, 0.3% for linework, and 0.5% for a full colour piece*

*(full colour is an ambiguous term, but the intent is to look at the extra amount of work and time that goes into colouring a completed piece vs. just putting forward a sketch or b&w linework. a sketch that happens to use colour pencils or a linework with a colour filter overlaid will be judged in the lower category)

Photoset Editors:

Post your photoset to tumblr, tag it #wlwdc steal, and send us a link.

Earn 0.1% per edited photo.

Playlist Curators:

Post your fanmix - consisting of at least 8 tracks - to Spotify

Link your playlist here, tag it #wlwdc steal, and send us a link to the post.

Earn 0.1% per 8 songs on the playlist, rounded to the nearest 8

Earn 0.1% per 200 words of liner notes (not including song titles or extended lyric quotations)

If you create your own cover art, the points for the relevant visual medium (art or photo editing) apply

Songwriters/Composers

0.1% per 10 seconds for original music/arrangement with 1-2 instruments (e.g. a piano solo, a pop song where you accompany yourself on guitar, a work for violin & piano accompaniment)

0.3% per 10 seconds for original music/arrangement for chamber ensemble/small band of 3-8 parts (e.g. a string quartet, an SATB choral work, a song performed by you and the rest of the 4 piece rock band you’re in)

0.5% per 10 seconds of original music/arrangement for a large ensemble of 9+ parts (e.g. a work for orchestra or marching band)

0.1% per 100 words of lyrics (entirely original or parody)

0.1% per 200 words of liner notes/analysis

For cover songs, a flat 0.1% per 30 seconds, unless you have provided a significantly new arrangement or orchestration

Cosplayers

0.1% per still photo, or 0.1% per 30 seconds of video where you are acting/performing in character

Arts & Crafts (Fibre Arts, Physical Collages, etc.)

Please upload at least one photograph of your completed craft item, and at least one unaltered photograph clearly showing the measurements of your work using a real life reference such as a tape measure or a ruler.

Please also list all materials used in your work (just broad categories is fine - e.g. if you make a friendship bracelet you can just say "string and beads", we don't need to know about every colour and category of bead you used!)

Base rate of 0.1% for works under 10x10cm and 0.3% for works over 10x10cm.

Earn an additional 0.1% per material category (thread, beads, glitter, photo cutouts, etc) - this includes base materials like cardboard, canvas, etc. but does not include adhesives such as tape or glue unless you are using e.g. washi tape or glitter glue in a way that significantly impacts the overall aesthetic appearance of your work. 

Please note that the size only applies to the surface area of what you actually did - so e.g. if you send a picture of a massive embroidery hoop but only a 5x5cm area is covered in embroidery we will only grant you the 0.1% base rate.

Compilations of the above (zines, comics, etc)

Judged by combining individual components - e.g. if you make a zine that includes 3 full colour art pieces (0.5 x 3), a 300 word ficlet (0.3), and a digital collage (0.5), you'll earn a total of 2.3 points.

Comics are judged by panel, though excessively similar panels (e.g. the same artwork with different speech bubbles) or very simplistic panels (e.g. a blank colour background that says THREE DAYS LATER) may be awarded a lower score than more complex panels.

If you're struck by creative urges not listed above, just drop me an ask and I can figure out what category it falls into and/or approximate percentage conversion rates if it's something totally new.

Please note that you cannot resubmit a fanwork you have already used as a steal work in a previous round, and steal points will not be carried over between rounds of the tournament!

edit: this goes without saying but absolutely no use of ai is allowed.

tldr; Make fanworks, tag this blog, steal points in the poll of your choice!

[thydungeongal]

you've actually given me a lot of insight and good thinking about the AI vs Copyright Law thing. rly when you think about it for longer than a few reactionary seconds, it definitely does have really genuinely Bad implications for what fanworks and the future of fanworks has in store based on that outcome, esp when we know that Big Corporation Number 293848402 hates transformative works. i think you actually changed my opinion of that entire lawsuit.

i'm still personally anti-AI bc of the environmental factors it has and the labor theft it has, along w the lack of being able to credit artists that "inspired" things, but i wanted to thank you for the skip to really dive in and think critically about the lawsuit itself!

Glad to hear it :) and like in case it hasn't been clear, I don't consider myself pro-AI by any stretch (the most pro-AI stance I have is "it's a neat gizmo that is being used in lots of places where it shouldn't be") but a lot of my frustrations with anti-AI positions come from the fact that they often end up promoting extremely bad stances on intellectual property which if made manifest would be catastrophic. But people should be critical of how it's being implemented into workflows and search engines and used to make workers redundant in ways that make the world a tangibly worse place. But none of that has anything to do with the technology itself coming from the Devil.

[ai-art-thieves]

Do you do non-AI art thieves? I see a lot of people making "fan works" of copyrighted works! It's "legal" (but hopefully not for much longer) and painfully derivative. Stop tracing, stop AI, stop tracing photographs, and stop making "fanworks" - all of it is art theft. Pathetic.

Nope. Just the ai art thieves.

...and another thing.

Tracing can be used as an art tool that people can use to learn more about anatomy and things they aren't comfortable to draw by themselves.

Plus, some artists out there are just young and starting out. All good artists have to start somewhere, and sometimes they trace.

....It becomes a concern when it's less about learning how to draw things and more about getting an easy way out/doing it for profit.

And fan works? Fan works are just that. Works made by fans. Heck, some of the best manga artists started out as fan artists and created doujins for certain popular manga franchises!

Sonic Mania was helmed by a person that made Sonic Fan Games!

The list can go on!

So I'm not so sure why you are demonizing fan works. If you are criticizing fan works that exist solely to profit off an existing franchise for a cheap buck, ok that's understandable.

You should've said that instead of not telling everyone what your definition of "fan works" is.

Sure, criticize the lack of effort and creativity that some people have, but you have to also remember that ideas can't come out of thin air.

All ideas are derivative at the end of the day. It's what you do with them that makes them unique, as well as how much effort you put into it.

Honestly anon, I think you are pathetic.

[doubledeadstudio]

Guys, let me extrapolate on my fanwork stance.

I have already explained my Guidelines on Tumblr, but some things seem to be unclear for some of you.

When I say people are allowed to make whatever fanwork with my content (provided it's not illegal or fed to Generative AI), I want to clarify that I'm not for or against it so much as I'm taking a completely neutral stance. I know it's not officially protected by IP law (for now), but the standard fare for contracts is for creators not to interfere with fanwork either way. (Like, it's ILLEGAL for showrunners to even read fans' fanfiction!)

Of course, I can see and read your fanart/fanfics, but for the most part, my intention is to not interfere with fan activity. This goes with the creation of merchandise I didn't officially make. If you aren't selling my stuff, great, but I am also not going to be involved in their creation.

The reason for this is that I intend to release my games in bigger platforms in the future. I am also looking into getting the copyright for them for my country. This is a business decision, not a personal one.

At the moment, I am only voluntarily sharing its contents to collaborators, contractors, and personal friends.

As for Generative AI, I consider this theft of my intellectual property, and I will be using every means of legal action I can do to take them down. This goes for selling ripped assets of my games for merchandise. Claiming that I officially sanctioned a merch line, even though I didn't, will also be ground for takedowns.

As for using Double Dead Studio games for illegal content, I mean this for propaganda, hateful content, and stuff like explicit pedophilia. Fanworks that depict dark but legal content (as in legal in REAL life) are allowed to stay up, because those creators are perfectly within their rights, and I have no opinion on their stuff anyway. Anyway, that's it.

Let me know if there are other terms about fan content that are unclear.

[lesmisshippingshowdown]

Poll Stealing: How it works

PLEASE BE AWARE THAT POLL STEALING SUBMISSIONS CLOSE *AFTER* POLLS HAVE EXPIRED - PLEASE CHECK OUR PINNED POST FOR THE PRECISE DEADLINE FOR THE CURRENT ROUND!

(concept and rules inspired by/shamelessly lifted from @hbowartournament - if you're in that fandom go and show their polls some love and maybe commit some theft over there too!)

For all steal works regardless of type, please ensure that you follow these submission guidelines:

Make a new post here on Tumblr including either your fanwork or a link to your work on the relevant platform (AO3, Spotify, etc.) and tag it #lmss steal

@ mention this blog (lesmisshippingshowdown) in your caption.

Send us an ask or submission (we are not able to open DMs on this blog unfortunately - blame Tumblr!) with a link to your post. If using asks, please be sure to break up the hyperlink to reduce the chance of Tumblr eating the post.

Now on to specific scoring guidelines for different fanwork categories:

Writers:

Post a fic (or new chapter) of at least 100 words to AO3. The pairing of your choice must be the primary relationship tag (and remember this poll is for romantic relationships only)

Link your fic here, tag it #lmss steal, and send us a link to the post. If your piece is part of a larger, previously established fic, please include in your message the word count of the new chapter.

Earn 0.1% for every 100 words, rounded to the nearest hundred

Artists:

Post your fanart to tumblr, tag it #lmss steal, and send us a link.

Earn 0.1% for a sketch, 0.3% for linework, and 0.5% for a full colour piece*

*(full colour is an ambiguous term, but the intent is to look at the extra amount of work and time that goes into colouring a completed piece vs. just putting forward a sketch or b&w linework. a sketch that happens to use colour pencils or a linework with a colour filter overlaid will be judged in the lower category)

Fanvid Editors:

Post your video to tumblr, tag it #lmss steal, and send us a link.

Earn 0.3% per 10 seconds for an AMV/fanvid using existing footage, and 0.5% per 10 seconds for an animatic.

Photo/Gifset Editors:

Post your photoset/gifset to tumblr, tag it #lmss steal, and send us a link.

Earn 0.1% per edited photo and 0.5% per gif/collage.

Playlist Curators:

Post your fanmix - consisting of at least 8 tracks (iykyk) - to Spotify (please create a YouTube mirror playlist if you do not have a Spotify account).

Link your playlist here, tag it #lmss steal, and send us a link to the post.

Earn 0.1% per 8 songs on the playlist, rounded to the nearest 8

Earn 0.1% per 200 words of liner notes (not including song titles or extended lyric quotations)

If you create your own cover art, the points for the relevant visual medium (art or photo editing) apply.

Songwriters/Composers

0.1% per 10 seconds for original music/arrangement with 1-2 instruments (e.g. a piano solo, a pop song where you accompany yourself on guitar, a work for violin & piano accompaniment)

0.3% per 10 seconds for original music/arrangement for chamber ensemble/small band of 3-8 parts (e.g. a string quartet, an SATB choral work, a song performed by you and the rest of the 4 piece rock band you’re in)

0.5% per 10 seconds of original music/arrangement for a large ensemble of 9+ parts (e.g. a work for orchestra or marching band)

0.1% per 100 words of lyrics (entirely original or parody)

0.1% per 200 words of liner notes/analysis

For cover songs, a flat 0.1% per 30 seconds, unless you have provided a significantly new arrangement or orchestration.

Cosplayers/Actors

For modern AU/closet cosplays: 0.1% per still photo, or 0.1% per 30 seconds of video where you are acting/performing in character.

For historical cosplays: a base score of 0.3%, plus an additional 0.1% per still photo, or 0.1% per 30 seconds of video where you are acting/performing in character.

Arts & Crafts (Fibre Arts, Physical Collages, etc.)

Please upload at least one photograph of your completed craft item, and at least one unaltered photograph clearly showing the measurements of your work using a real life reference such as a tape measure or a ruler.

Please also list all materials used in your work (just broad categories is fine - e.g. if you make a friendship bracelet you can just say "string and beads", we don't need to know about every colour and category of bead you used!)

Base rate of 0.1% for works under 10x10cm and 0.3% for works over 10x10cm.

Earn an additional 0.1% per material category (thread, beads, glitter, photo cutouts, etc) - this includes base materials like cardboard, canvas, etc. but does not include adhesives such as tape or glue unless you are using e.g. washi tape or glitter glue in a way that significantly impacts the overall aesthetic appearance of your work. This will be decided at mods' discretion.

Please note that the size only applies to the surface area of what you actually did - so e.g. if you send a picture of a massive embroidery hoop but only a 5x5cm area is covered in embroidery we will only grant you the 0.1% base rate.

Compilations of the above (zines, comics, etc)

Judged by combining individual components - e.g. if you make a zine that includes 3 full colour art pieces (0.5 x 3), a 300 word ficlet (0.3), and a digital collage (0.5), you'll earn a total of 2.3 points.

Comics are judged by panel, though at moderators' discretion excessively similar panels (e.g. the same artwork with different speech bubbles) or very simplistic panels (e.g. a blank colour background that says THREE DAYS LATER) may be awarded a lower score than more complex panels, or discounted entirely.

If you're struck by creative urges not listed above, just drop us an ask and we can figure out what category it falls into and/or approximate percentage conversion rates if it's something totally new.

Please note that you cannot resubmit a fanwork you have already used as a steal work in a previous round, and steal points will not be carried over between rounds of the tournament!

Finally, please be aware that at the moderators' discretion we can and will discount any fanworks that seem particularly low effort or designed to game the system to earn more points. Works created using generative AI will be immediately disqualified, no arguments.

The goal of poll stealing is not to just Get Points By Any Means Necessary - it's intended to be an opportunity for you to show real world applications of your love for a given ship. Have fun with it, and a little bit of gamesmanship is all well and good, but let's try to remember the reason for the season!

[sublimati0ns]

Sorry I’m going to make an off-topic rant about original fiction specifically (non-fandom!) because there’s this post going around that made me pause AHA

Disclaimer at the start: I love when people are inspired by my fanworks! I love seeing things I’ve drawn or mentioned on my blog appear in other people’s works or headcanons. As long as my fanworks aren’t being reposted, copied / traced, or used for genAI I’m happy! I even welcome redraws or derivative works (fics, followups, etc) as long as I’m credited ^^

But when it comes to original fiction, I’m like… Hmmm ;;; I’ve had some experiences that have made me averse to sharing my characters and stories with the world.

Cuz do people actually say this and not just mean “don’t plagiarise my designs, character / worldbuilding concepts, and stories under the guise of ‘inspiration’ ”? 😭 I feel like taking heavy inspiration from a small artist’s work—especially when used to build an online presence or as the basis of something intended to be published—is pretty harmful?

A lot of comments in this post are saying “nothing is 100% original and taking inspiration is natural,” which is true, but there’s a pretty big difference between emotionally connecting to a piece such that it motivates you to work on your own things and straight up copying someone… And when it comes to the latter, there is definitely nuance! Imitating the art from a big IP or of a long-dead world-renowned master is really not the same as imitating an independent hobbyist… A teenager with no following ripping off someone’s OCs isn’t the same as a grown ass adult emulating another small artist’s works to sell commissions or publish comics with.

(It’s also different when people properly credit who inspired them or got permission to make derivative works, etc.)

I know some people are fine with being emulated (which is great!) but as a whole, isn’t it entitled to say that, just because someone chooses to share their art with the world, that art is now free to be taken apart and used for consumer gain? I’m confused LOL is there some part of the discourse I’m missing?

Obviously people don’t own palettes, compositions, certain design traits, rendering techniques, etc but like—each individual artist has their own way of putting all these pieces together. Why would you want to copy someone else’s style instead of developing your own? The people who inspire us put a lot of work into their art; as fellow artists, why shouldn’t we respect that and not try to overstep our bounds as fans (ie. not presuming they’ll be flattered by imitation without asking first)?

I just can’t wrap my head around the idea of someone saying “don’t take inspiration from my art” and meaning “don’t perceive my art” or “I don’t want my art to resonate with you.” Like—do people actually mean it like that rather than straightforwardly requesting people don’t rip off their works and insist “well that’s what you get for trusting us with it—you should know plagiarism inspiration is totally fine cuz it’s the internet!”? 💀

TL;DR I may be wrong, but I personally think OP might be taking the “don’t take inspiration from my art” thing out of context, which is what gave me pause. In my experience, most of the time when people say that it’s cuz they’ve been plagiarised under the guise of “inspiration,” not because they don’t want people to resonate with their art.

(Again, disclaimer I’m talking about IP theft revolving around the original characters / stories of small, independent artists, who—unlike big IPs—can be harmed if other people lift heavily from their works to turn a profit.)

[carry-on-many-cakes]

FAQS

What is CO Many Cakes Fest? CO Many Cakes Fest is an event intended to showcase the creativity of the CO fandom—how even with everyone following the same prompt the fics can go in so many unique directions! Each year, there will be a yearly prompt that participants can create for. (why are we talking about cake?)

How do I participate? Create any fanwork (fics, art, memes, and more!) inspired by the yearly prompt! No sign ups required, simply post your work to the AO3 collection when you’re finished! If posting on tumblr, we ask that you use the hashtag #COManyCakes and/or #comc2025 and tag this blog <3

What’s the prompt for this year? The prompt for this year is Grand Theft Auto!

When do I post? Whenever you finish! The prompt will stay for the whole year, and in order to reduce the stress for this event, you can post whenever you finish—at any point in the year! Just be sure to post into the collection on AO3, and tag this blog if posting on tumblr so we see it and can reblog your work!

Can I collab with someone? Can I create more than one piece? What kinds of fanwork can I make? Yes, yes, and anything! We’d love to see all kinds of fanwork created for this event!

Who is running this event? @the-beard-of-edward-teach and @roomwithanopenfire!

Is there a discord for this event? No, but there's a channel in the Carry On Server where you're free to brainstorm/chat about ideas! The server is open to everyone so feel free to join. (And let us know if this link is expired <3)

Can I tease WIPs? Yes please! And tag this blog if you do, so we can reblog it :)

I have another question not on here. Send us an ask! Since this is the first year we’re running this, there’s bound to be something we haven’t thought of. Ask away :)