A sister site for Fuwanovel.com based around VN Creation

[Aaeru_]

Well there is a lot to address here but firstly, my aim is not to just promote visual novels to the West. My aim is to increase fan translation. You can't convince people to help you unless they think what you are doing is good, not bad. Moral, not immoral. That is why the anticopyright stance. (which btw only constitutes a banner on every page about the size of HALF of your finger.) Is that really enough to deter the more important goal?

Also I encourage people to read up on what is the true purpose of copyright because there is a lot of misunderstanding here. The idea for a sister site is just that, an idea. I'm not going to shoulder it. Someone else will. I'm doing this for Raide.
Please give this page a shot. http://questioncopyright.org/faq I think that the topic truly deserves some more investigation.

What is the Purpose of Copyright?

Copyright was created as "An Act for the encouragement of learning."[1] It did so by guaranteeing the public ACCESS to the work of "learned men." You can see the clearly by the requirement to donate FREE copies to the nations archive for public use.

"no person shall be entitled to the benefit of this act...unless he shall first deposit" Only AFTER you have given the public access to your work, can you subsequently claim the limited exclusive right to TRY to profit from your work. Original US law requires at least two copies be deposited, original British law requires copies be sent to every major library (nine) which was later increased to twelve.

The US copyright act itself, is clearly derived from the British "Statute of Anne". (Almost as if by a plagiarist.) Direct statements can be found there as to the intention of the concept.

"Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Printed, Reprinted, and Published Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families: For Preventing therefore such Practices for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books;"[2]

Clearly, copyright was NEVER intended to protect the authors and/or publishers from the public. It directly addressed the problem of PUBLISHERS cheating authors, and thereby discouraging them from writing any of their learnings down. Since most people did not have direct contact with these "learned men" there was no way to pass on this knowledge to the next generation.

By vesting the work in the author, the act gave the learned men incentive to write their work down. By requiring deposit in libraries and archives, the act encouraged learning by enabling ACCESS to that knowledge.

(Everything else is a corruption of these basic principles.)

[1] http://www.copyright.gov/history/1790act.pdf
[2] http://www.copyrighthistory.com/anne.html

[Darkmoonfire]

Well there is a lot to address here but firstly, my aim is not to just promote visual novels to the West. My aim is to increase fan translation. You can't convince people to help you unless they think what you are doing is good, not bad. Moral, not immoral. That is why the anticopyright stance. (which btw only constitutes a banner on every page about the size of HALF of your finger.) Is that really enough to deter the more important goal?

Right, let's just rewrite what's moral and what isn't because it's inconvenient. Seriously, what's wrong with these people who actually want people to pay for a game just because there's a price tag! They're going to ruin the VN MARKET! [/sarcasm]

You know what, supporting piracy can really be enough to deter the more important goal. Because the end doesn't always justify the means. If people don't approve of your methods, they will not want to be associated with you in any way, even if they support your goal.
I'm against piracy. I've heard pirates argue that what they're doing is okay, or that they're even making the world a better place by being pirates. No ones given me an argument I can actually buy.
You should have the right to anything you create, even if it's an easily copyable computer file. You should have a right to say "You can't use this unless you pay me first". And as for the original copyright laws? They were made a long time ago, when no one could have even though up internet. There is no way those laws could take it into account. But that doesn't mean that peoples should no longer have the rights to there games, just because people over a hundred years ago says they couldn't. Frankly, I think that no copyrights would work perfectly in, and only in, an utopia. Which is not where we live.

Also, stating that the anti-copyright policy exists because you want people to think what you're doing is moral gives me strong "Morality is whatever is convenient at the moment, and not actually what's right" vibes. This is a philosophy that deeply offends me.

[papillon]

It may be only a small banner, but it's obviously a very important issue to you and an important element behind you creating your site.

That limits the ability of anyone else to work with you if they don't want to look like they're endorsing your beliefs.

If you take a loud public stance you shouldn't be surprised if people who disagree choose not to associate with you, or even with a 'sister' site that is connected to you.

There are a lot of arguments to be made against current copyright law. A handwavy attempt to claim that one 'original' law might by letter have meant something different than it obviously did in spirit is not a good argument, and does very much come across as self-justification.

[Aaeru_]

You should have the right to anything you create, even if it's an easily copyable computer file.

If you support copyright, then you must be willing to consider and be aware of the trade-offs and commit to making that sacrifice. http://questioncopyright.org/what_we_lo ... #copyright
I am not willing.
Law is not a simple game of protecting what feels right to me. There is a cost to society. And that cost in the case of copyright, is enormous.
Law does not always equal morality. I am asking you to question the law. There is no justice in following a set of unjust laws.



"No society that kept its laws secret could ever be called free.
No government that hid its regulations from the regulated could ever stand in our tradition.
Law controls. But it does so justly only when visibly. And law is visible only when its terms are knowable and controllable by those it regulates. . . ."
-Lawrence Lessig, Introduction to Richard Stallman’s Free Software, Free Society.

If you take a loud public stance you shouldn't be surprised if people who disagree choose not to associate with you

I chose to go against the tides of the world.
To give you some background, I come from a fan translation scene whose development has been greatly handcuffed by the oppression of government and corporations preying on people like them, preying on us, the "Unthinking Masses". The general ignorance on the nature of copyright is not by chance. It is the result of a huge advertising/lobbying campaign run by the industry, which deliberately seeks to confuse "property" and "intellectual property". To me, the cost of a few who end up not supporting me is greatly outweighed by the amount we can propel this 'medium' across the globe. VNs and its ideas should benefit All of society. Virtual boyfriends and virtual girlfriends are too awesome an invention to keep a secret.

"Indeed, it is the private intellectual property rights of the richest nations and richest rights holders that are one of the leading sources of the current inequality between rich and poor nations. It is in the very act of upholding and enforcing these private property rights that these inequalities are deepened. If, as Macaulay argued in his famous speech on copyright duration more than one hundred and sixty years ago, that copyright is “a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers”85 (and to publishers we can add), there can be no fairness in a requirement that poor countries of the South and their users must, in the guise of equal or national treatment, pay the same bounty and same level of taxation to rights holders— primarily corporate interests located in rich industrialised countries—as users in these rich countries are required to pay."
- page 784 Burn Berne http://copysouth.org/portal/node/36

Ultimately You are proposing that 2/3's of the globe who make roughly $2 a day are not entitled to benefit from the achievements of human culture because they do not have the ability to pay 1st world country prices. Is that fair?

Read this page. http://copysouth.org/portal/node/3 It is similar in a way, to the plight of the fan translator.

Also Piracy is not killing the industry.
Far from it, in fact - the sky is rising.



And it is rising exponentially even while we are coming out of the world's worst recession in 70 years. Why would people pay for entertainment when they can have it for free?
"It just doesn't make sense!". Well... the reason why is, it's not that the money has disappeared because of piracy. What has happened is, it has transformed into a different business model, one that is based Not in the old way of doing things. You don't have to make money by selling content like you sell a glass of milk. You can sell things that can't be copied, like Immediacy, Trust and Accessibility. http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Without_Inte ... l_Property
http://www.gwennseemel.com/index.php/bl ... e_culture/

The internet completely obsoletes copyright.

[redeyesblackpanda]

Alright, here's why pirating is not good:

A waiter at a restaurant gets paid. This is because he is contributing his human capital.
The man that works as a doctor gets paid. He spends his time working as a doctor, and is compensated with pay. Without pay, he would starve. He put himself through years of medical school and built skills that most people don't have. This is why he gets paid more than the waiter. He is also contributing his human capital.

What about someone who writes a story, or composes a piece of music? They spend large amounts of their time creating these things. They need to get paid.

You might argue, "They're already getting paid by the company!"
Well, even if that's the case, the company is now paying money. They need to make it back, and they need to make more to cover other costs, such as the cost of the janitor that cleans up at night, or of the managers that oversaw the writers.

Ignoring all that, you have to consider the following: Profit is a motivator.
Few people are going to spend months at a time working on something if they expect to get nothing in return for their efforts. Why would an artist take the risk of spending hundreds to thousands of dollars on a high quality tablet and computer if they had no promise of a potential reward?

Let's say that you want to play a game. Flipping a coin, if it's head, you pay me a dollar, if it's tails, nothing happens. Why would you want to play that game?

Now, let's say that you'll pay me one dollar if it's heads, and I'll pay you two if it's tails. At this point, it makes sense to play the game, because while you're rising a dollar, you have the potential of gaining. This principle applies to people doing work or risking their money. They have no motivation to do either if there's no potential for gain.

Hm... this post ended up pretty long. I hope it's not too much of a rant, but I had to say this.

Edit: Also, one thing to point out is that the figure you've posted is very misleading. Revenue, for example, does not factor in costs, which have gone on the rise as well. Additionally, these figures do not adjust for inflation. Inflation of the US dollar has been 34.3% since 2000 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=in ... +2000-2012 That means that 81 dollars today is worth significantly less than 80 dollars a decade ago. Some of the data also has no relevance. Just because there are more films being made does not mean that the industry is strong. Even according to your figure, while the number of films has about tripled, the spending on them has not. This means that each film that is created makes less money. (and I'm still not factoring in inflation. Inflation makes things even more dismal)

[DaFool]

@Aaeru >> Uh, I was wondering about the anti-copyright articles you kept digging up at fuwanovel, I didn't think you'd do the same thing here. I couldn't care less about that topic, I just care about the EVN medium being a respectable one.

The idea for a sister site is just that, an idea. I'm not going to shoulder it. Someone else will. I'm doing this for Raide.

Okay then why not let Raide handle the crusade then? I know him to have supported Studio Super63, 4LS, and Christine Love. May he continue to support good EVN creators. But as far as I know, working from Twitter and working from forums are entirely different beasts. You have to like, police the latter and keep things on topic, since you have people working together who start off as entire strangers, not as followers / friends.

[Darkmoonfire]

The most valid point I heard is that the internet makes it hard to enforce copyright laws without violating peoples rights. This does not make piracy okay! Yes, I'm willing to take the trade-offs you say hurt society so badly. Partially because I don't think it hurts society nearly as much as you claim, and partially I think that telling the world that something is moral because its easy and convenient is more damaging to society. Everyone doing it doesn't make it okay. Racism will not become okay just because everyone does it.

Ignoring money, piracy is still not moral. Piracy is blatantly disrespectful towards the creators. If they wanted people to be able to have it for free, then they would have released it for free in the first place! Nothing that disregards others feelings that much can considered moral. Of course, not being moral doesn't mean it's illegal...
So we're back to money now. Redeyesblackpanda has a lot of really good points here, especially the fact about statistics easily being bended to serve ones purpose, and has probably worded it better than I ever will, but I'll try to add a few points of my own. Apparently, by releasing free copies of games the fan base will grow, and actually boost the profit of the company. This is just false. While the fan base will be bigger, all of the new people that piracy would introduce would be the kind of people who don't pay for there games. Which will NOT increase profit. Why would someone who got a free pirated copy of their first VN stop getting free pirated versions after that? Some may, because they understand that the creators need money to continue, but the vast majority won't. Certainly the few who do start buying the games will not be nearly as much the former people who were buying games that stopped because they don't need to pay to play the games anymore. Large fanbase =/= Large profit if most of those people aren't paying any money.

While there is nothing I can do to stop piracy, that does not mean that I have to accept piracy, or associate or agree with people who actively encourage piracy. No amount of people can change what's moral and what's not. I'll start questioning government laws when I have reason to believe that they're wrong (and I do some of the time. I just happen to think that they're right about this).

[Anna]

Dear Aearu, without the 'evil' copyright, the expensive niche visual novels which you adore so much and any kind of entertainment which takes a lot of money to make, will not be made anymore. So what are you trying to do, destroy the production of the entertainment you like? Smart move.

[papillon]

I chose to go against the tides of the world.

Yeah, fine, whatever, but then you really obviously should not be surprised that many people do not agree with you and that many of those people will choose not to be associated with you and your projects.

There's no point in having the copyright debate here, Aaeru_ is not going to change opinion and neither are any of the people whose livelihoods are at stake. So if that's the route this thread is going it should probably just be locked.

[PyTom]

The fundamental problem - the one there isn't a good solution for, apart from copyright - is that without copyright, there's a limit to how much time a creator can spend on their creations. If you have to support yourself by fixing cars or building bridges, there's only so many hours a day that they can work on making visual novels. That fundamentally limits the scope of the games that people can make - if you want to make a game in 6 months or a year, you can get a lot more done if you can work on it full time.

If I could work on Ren'Py full time, I'd estimate I could get 3 times as much done. Maybe more.

One thing to realize is that the EVN community is is very different than the JVN translation community. The JVN translation community exists largely in the shadow of the Japanese JVN community. The JVN creators make games that appeal to their locals - if they don't make any foreign money, it doesn't matter to them. But if the local market was to stop buying JVNs - and download them for free since copyright went away - the JVN creator community would have to become amateur. That would probably shrink the diversity of the form, as it means that we'd be limited to games that could be made in their spare time.

The EVN community is like that as well. If nobody bought the games, the commercial creators among us would have to go back to doing other things with their time. I think that would be a major loss.

Now, that being said, there are a lot of things that less flexible copyright holders are doing to give copyright a good name. SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions are horrid - and I think that there will be rightful pushback. We can't lose free communication in the hope of stopping copyright violations before they happen - free communications is one of the major rights that we deserve to have.


The commercial EVN community does a lot of things right when it comes to copyright:

- They make their works available to everyone - I think. Anyone in the world can order Planet Stronghold or Magical Diary, and have it in their virtual hands quickly. There's no dealing with paying exorbitant prices to move things around the world. (I don't know how accessible credit-card style payments are to people around the world, though)

- The prices are fair. (I think.)

- There isn't onerous DRM on the games - the experience of someone who bought the game is better than that of someone who illegally downloads it.

- Creators tend to be very accessible - look at this thread. If you want to translate or release fan works, you can just ask them and they'll likely give permission. I can think of at least one series of fangames based on an English Visual Novel.


That being said, there's lots of ways we could be better, as a community, at copyright:

License, please. Most of our games don't have easily accessible licenses. A few seconds on the Magical Diary and Planet Stronghold pages didn't find much in the way of license text. Maybe I didn't look hard enough - but it would be nice to see it more prominently.

Orphan work preservation. I worry a bit about what will happen to some of these works if the creators are incapacitated or lose interest. Copyright - in most of our cases - is life of the author plus 70 years. So if something happens and your heirs aren't interested in distributing your game, that's 7 decades before a new person could acquire a legal copy.

We need to license our noncommercial games under creative commons, or other licenses that more clearly allow distribution. And for commercial games - it would be nice to have some sort of "deadman's switch", so that if a game is off the market for a year or two it is relicensed as public domain or creative commons.

I don't know 100% how to pull this off legally - I haven't been in a position where I needed to do it - but it would be really nice to have.

Fanworks. We should be aggressive about allowing noncommercial derivative works, like fanfics, fanart, and fan translations, provided they are not distributed with commercial works. I think we are really good at allowing this - but it's best to get ahead of the curve on it.

The Developing World. They just released a $35 computer that has a good chance of running Ren'Py well. Couple that with some used parts, and we'll potentially have a large number of people who can afford a computer but would have trouble paying developed-world prices for software. Can we come up with a way of addressing them?



To sum up, my stance is: the EVN creator community is different from the JVN translation community, and more like the JVM creator community, and would be hurt if copyright was to go away entirely. We tend to be far better than the copyright interests at making our work available in a consumer friendly manner. But there are ways in which copyright can be improved, and we might want to consider getting out ahead of the curve on them.

[M_Abts]

Wow, what an interesting thread! You know your forum post is in trouble when random lawyers start appearing.

I don't really want to weigh in on this debate, but I don't think the mainstream copyleft goes so far as to advocate just taking other people's works and using them without compensation in a manner like we currently use public domain works. The copyleft points to problems with our current scheme of federal copyright law, and talks about how if we removed the federal law, you're still left with common law remedies that can protect creators.

Anyway, most of the copyleft calls for reform of the federal laws, not complete abolition. If you're taking away the message that all laws about intellectual property should be abolished and all creative works should be "free" as though this would create some sort of anarchic bohemian creative paradise, I think you're receiving the wrong message about copyleft. The old patronage systems weren't that romantic, and Europe (and, independently, China) moved away from them for good reasons.

There are some interesting articles comparing US and European copyright law, which is the background for the PirateBay lawsuits. Great movie, by the way. We could definitely use some copyright law rebalancing in this country -- just my opinion, mind. It's a big political debate with no easy answers.

Somebody mentioned Fanfic being a "grey area", and someone else talked about it as a "derivative work". Both comments are correct! Some Fanfic falls into fair use, some fanfic is transformative, and much of it (probably most of it) falls into non-fair use derivative work, but often with some independently copyright elements. I like to give talks about fanworks and copyright and how to protect your original artwork on places like DeviantArt. Hopefully the Portland (Oregon, USA) anime convention (Kumoricon) will let me give a talk this year.

As far as fan translation websites -- there's a pretty good, if still nascent, indie-import translation scene developing. Carpe Fulgur and Nyu Media, for a couple examples. These small companies are releasing inexpensive, low-priced games, after licensing the content from the overseas creators. Nyu Media's forthcoming Cherry Tree High School game is a doujinshi-created work that's somewhat close to a visual novel by the look of it. I'll be buying it on release.

I've done some enforcement for foreign nationals against USA copyright infringers before (most notably a con-artist guy who was stealing the DeviantArt manga comic designs of a Philippines teenage girl and printing them on t-shirts). I wouldn't hesitate to protect a creator's rights by preventing a fanfic translation of something that could be licensed. I mean, that's kind of my job. I usually start with a polite letter.

We're starting to see more and more individual artists registering copyrights (often in compilations so they don't have to pay $35 per artwork), and sticking up for their work. There are more and more successful independent artists, and the market continues to globalize, meaning you're now rubbing shoulders with artists all over the world, and competing in the same market. The days of having to belong to a "label" (a big company that holds licenses) are over. This also isn't the fansub market of the 80s. Ah, sweet VHS memories . . . Conventions used to be *necessary* just so you could trade cool anime. Every series was a hard-won treasure. Complete series were GOLD. Actually, I think I literally saw somebody trade gold jewelry for anime once. Beats a pawn shop.

I guess I just digressed all over this thread, sorry. I'm actually writing @Pytom -- if you or anyone else is interested in licensing, feel free to drop me a line. I can only accept US clients from Oregon, but I'm happy to give some general advice (rather than legal advice) and chat about licensing. I'm a "Volunteer Lawyer for the Arts", which means I give discounted (and sometimes free, usually to artists below the poverty line) representation to artists, and do general artist legal education. If you're in the USA, you may have a Volunteer Lawyer for the Arts in your community -- check it out! (There a bunch of great ones in NYC, which, along with Chicago, was one of the centers for the movement back when it was first starting.)

Anyway, you folks are doing great work! Keep it up! I like having a steady stream of pretty graphics and soap-opera plot lines to enliven my evenings, even if it does get me in trouble sometimes. Like a couple weeks ago when a friend of mine caught me video game-dating a girl with no arms. I think I'll be hearing about it for a LONG time. She works with monkeys, and recently said at dinner she knows some cool monkey chicks with very dexterous toes if I want to get hooked up. Luckily, I've got some ammo to fight back -- SHE'S dating a terminally ill amphibian assassin.
. . .
I need to think up some clever comment about that for the next time I'm at dinner with her and her husband.

Please excuse the forum trolling -- I love copyright law and just can't stop myself from commenting on threads like this. Just my two cents.

Have a good one,
-
Matthew Abts
OregonStartup.com

[papillon]

Somewhat tangentially, there's now apparently yet another example of a fanfic author managing to file off the serial numbers enough to publish - and being successful.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17332129