Comment on World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 2 days agothe main mechanic to get more commissions is to become more popular
Similarly, there are many popular games who started as a mod for another mainstream title, gained support, and pivoted to their own independent game.
And the whole copyright thing is way less of an issue in fan arts, I regularly see a lot of people freely taking money for doing commissions of popular characters like Hatsune Miku
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:
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Ok, so then what is your criticism of Turtle WoW? You’re ok with fan-made art, you don’t care about the legality of IP law, they are more than likely pulling players (and profits) away from blizzard, so are you just critical of the fact that they’re not profiting as much as they could/should be?
On the note of “morally good”, consider Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes. Watterson had the integrity and legal protection to say that Calvin and Hobbes should exist as a set of comic strips and nothing else. He refused to do what every other comic creator did, selling their IP to mass produce toys, and movies, and clothes etc. He didn’t want to monetization to taint people’s experience with the characters.
So if i understand your position correctly, it is “morally good” that people regularly violate his copyright by creating those bumper stickers of Calvin pissing on various brands and sell them for their own profit, a profit that Watterson himself refuses to enjoy for the good of the art. But you disagree, and profits of others is more important?