Comment on World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit
hisao@ani.social 2 days agoIt’s very different, in multiple ways. Artists earn money from commissions, the main mechanic to get more commissions is to become more popular. Algorithms on main platforms work by association. It’s as simple as this:
- I draw my OCs, I want to do commissions.
- Very few people are viewing my posts and are aware of me.
- What do I do to attract more people, who will in turn buy more commissions?
- Draw a fanart of popular character and/or a trending gimmick (your version of new Sonic x Miku meme, Miku birthday, you OC wearing Asuka cloth, you OC in Ghibli style, etc).
- This posts gets pushed by algorithm into the feeds of people who like certain popular character or shown interest in current gimmick/meme/trend thing.
- Some of those people after enjoying post go to artist’s page and view their other works.
- If they like what they see they might subscribe and order commissions later. And, this is not all: to my knowledge, the whole copyright thing is way less of an issue in fan arts, I definitely see a lot of people freely taking money for doing commissions of popular characters like Hatsune Miku for example, or characters from popular animes.
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Similarly, there are many popular games who started as a mod for another mainstream title, gained support, and pivoted to their own independent game.
But you recognize that is always illegal, right? The only reason it happens is because they’re too small and distributed for lawyers to go after every single one. But if one started gaining traction selling custom work featuring copyrighted IP, they should expect a lawsuit just like Turtle WoW. Mods are fan art, Turtle WoW is fan art, they just got popular enough that blizzard lawyers now care.
The only difference here is that, as I said before, technically if Turtle WoW did it right they would never have to distribute any blizzard assets, and never make money from blizzard IP. They could theoretically be completely independent from blizzard and still distribute the exact same content. Meanwhile fan art is always dependent on the IP it references. So ironically, all your criticisms of about work being dependent on the corpos always applies to fan art, but only maybe apply to Turtle WoW if they messed up.
hisao@ani.social 2 days ago
The scale is not comparable at all. 100% of artists hugely benefit from fan arts, while maybe 0.01% of modders of popular games benefit from their mods.
This is basically what I’m saying:
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Totally agree, but a dozen apples and a bushel of apples are both a bunch of apples. Scale doesn’t really change what I’m saying.
If I understand your point correctly, it’s not the profit from the fan art that the creator gets, it’s that the fan art drives profit of their original artwork, right? Because we both agree that profiting from someone else’ IP is illegal, right?
As well as any fan art itself, legally speaking, right?
hisao@ani.social 2 days ago
It’s both, and what matters more to me is what works in practice. I consider it totally morally good to profit from content based on someone else’ copyrighted IP. Creator spent effort -> creator can sell their work. It’s sometimes illegal but it should always be legal. By the way, when something is illegal but you think it shouldn’t be, it’s a good soul practice to regularly commit crimes in this area (that you can get away with), to get used and psychologically comfortable with two simple facts: