Danbooru

Pool/Doujinshi Removal: mitsumoto

Posted under General

Could you post the names of the deleted pools?

One of the pools was a doujinshi drawn by multiple artists (collaboration).
Can't you just restore the pool and only delete posts containing his art? pool #xxxx mitsumoto

Example: post #873352 by cream_(nipakupa) deleted because of mitsumoto's request.

Edit: Of the doujin in pool #2844, he posted samples on pixiv which are now child posts of the deleted posts. id:818744..818750 mitsumoto.

Updated

albert said:
He has said that it is still fine to upload his Pixiv account art.

Wow, that's pretty awesome of him. Progressive, even. But still...damn! I can't read his handwriting for beans...

EDIT: Wait, so pool #677 is fine because it's on Pixiv? That's a relief. (Shoot, I hope it wasn't a mistake to bring this up...)

Updated

albert said:
I received an email from mitsumoto asking that I take down his uploaded doujinshi, which mainly refers to pool #2844 and pool #3090. He has proven his identity. He has said that it is still fine to upload his Pixiv account art.

Hmm, that's much better than most artists go about it. However I'm not too happy about completely destroying the pools, which included, amongst others, the info where and when the doujins were to be published :\.

This brings me to a proposal: maybe we could actually exploit this to create a better setup for both sides. How about he lets us publish the doujins some time after whatever events he sells them at, and provides referral links to an online outlet where they could be ordered. In return we follow some agreed upon policy about uploading commercial works (mainly the date I assume) and display said referral link in the pool header.

This solution would be superior for several reasons:

  • We're hands down the best-tagged and -organised repository around, and we're absolutely most careful about attributing the original artists of any given piece of work. This means a doujin here will be about 100x easier to go from to a place where you could actually buy a copy than some random post-comiket or post-reitaisai scanned upload (and those will be made).
  • We have actual policies and moderation in place.
  • We probably give more publicity to good artists than they could ever hope to get otherwise in the non-Japanese fandom. And as mentioned above, it's extremely well-tagged, linked and policied publicity.
  • We have a very good translation system in place. Which translates to way more accessibility to Western audience.
  • And for most event-exclusive doujins, uploading scans has absolutely no effect whatsoever on the sales (since those happen only during the event), whereas 99.9% of our users can't exactly just drop by the next Reitaisai to pick up a hardcopy, even if they really wanted to. So they have no other way to read the doujin than through the (currently-unauthorised) uploads.

This would need a couple of technical and policy changes to support properly, but I don't think they'd be very major:

  • First, a policy and an explanation page (with a competent Japanese version) would have to be drafted and linked so that any artist looking to take down their artwork would land on it first.
    • Plus a thread and a team tasked with negotiating the specific terms for each published piece with individual artists.
  • Second, a way to mark pools as official commercial works together with referral links to online stores that'll be displayed whenever a user browses the pool.
    • Perhaps also approved per-artist donation pages through paypal, Flattr, etc. I can imagine that organising the distribution of non-event printing runs could be a hurdle for many artists, but if the user has already read a doujin here, I'm sure many would be willing to spend a bit to say thank you. This is particularly easy with Flattr, where you have a monthly budget you pay anyway, and you're only deciding where to send it, so it generates no additional costs on your side.
  • A way to mark pools (and their constituent posts) temporarily invisible/inaccessible while they're waiting for publication
    • And a way to mark users as contributing translators / uploaders so that they're able to access such pools. Perhaps a new Translator user level, or perhaps by reusing the Builder status.

I believe a system as outlined above could result in something that's better for both sides (we get to keep the posts, and they get to sell the doujins to more people), and hopefully solve the problem of artists not liking danbooru in a more systematic way

Hmm, and you're the one that always shoots me down for complicated pie-in-the-sky feature requests.

I don't think this is a bad idea per se, but I think it causes us to start treading on some thin ice. Danbooru has always been in a legal and commercial grey area (greyer for some content than others), and we have basically persisted given the good will and tolerance of artists to allow us to grab and process their stuff.

Allowing artists to commercialize their work via Danbooru, and starting to throw stuff up behind pay-walls sort of starts us on a slippery slope.

First, you've now given every artist out there a motivation to say, "either charge for our content (and give us the proceeds), or remove it".

Second, once things are behind a pay-wall (even if you allow veterans to bypass the system), you aren't going to have the efficient and effective crowd-sourcing available to get the high-quality translations and tagging we currently see.

Also charging for a user's freely given work is shady in itself, and at least would require a major EULA overhaul. I can imagine a lot of contributors wanting a cut of the proceeds Mechanical Turk style, if their work is to be used commercially.

Third, officially implementing and maintaining the architecture, and dealing with the inevitable security and legal issues that come with formally processing money and intellectual property will take more time and energy away from maintaining the core architecture of the system.

Allowing an artist to have a "Donate to me" button on each of their posts while leaving the posts themselves open to the public, would be a nice gesture, and is something I've thought of in the past (it's got a very Richard Stallman vibe to it). Though even that might lead us in a dangerous direction.

Updated

Anelaid said:
I think its a question of whether or not we want to muck with the current system in regards to this. I think its a cool idea, but I'm not sure if its within our scope to do really.

I'm not entirely sure I follow. Why'd it not be (aside from albert stepping in and saying "no way I'm ever implementing this")?

I think what he's saying is we'd need to decide if we want to change or amend our purpose towards helping content providers sell their product, rather than simply collecting and annotating things, as we currently do. (Currently, selling things is outside our scope)

I think there's a bit of distinction between "collecting" or "aggregating" and what we do. This site, the way we run it, is curated. Annotating, digesting, localising, oragnising, assigning taxonomies, filling hierarchies, digging out history and context...this is an archive and a community.

However, the history we deal with is still very much alive. And though many of these artists are, themselves, technically engaging in copyright infringement, this doesn't give us any particular mandate to harm them. But neither does it dissolve our mandate to preserve the artefacts of this period and domain as best we are able.

So I think 葉月's suggestion (list) is sound and I'd really like for it (all) to come to pass (I can't count the number of times I've lamented my inability to throw money at artists, musicians, and programmers I like just because they're great). If it's a positive and symbiotic relationship, it may well raise awareness of the value of our classification to an Eastern audience as well. And that would just be icing on the cake.

tl;dr: This is important. We need to make this happen. Yesterday.

Shinjidude said:
I think what he's saying is we'd need to decide if we want to change or amend our purpose towards helping content providers sell their product, rather than simply collecting and annotating things, as we currently do. (Currently, selling things is outside our scope)

Very much this.

also the concept of a "content aggregator" or whatever it was called during the dot.com era isn't something I really understand or am comfortable with.

Shinjidude said:
I think what he's saying is we'd need to decide if we want to change or amend our purpose towards helping content providers sell their product, rather than simply collecting and annotating things, as we currently do. (Currently, selling things is outside our scope)

Ah, yes, but I really see it as a way to make content providers less hostile towards what we do. I wouldn't want or advocate actively contacting artists or anything in this vein, I'd just like to be able to offer that as an alternative to a takedown notice. We wouldn't really be selling anything either, just giving one more type of info: "this item can be paid for at X".

It's not a bad idea in theory but in practice I can't see any of it working.

They will sell 1 offsite copy for every 100-1000 readers whereas if they restrict it completely here they can at least keep the blatant piracy of their works under some degree of control.

1 copy per 1000 readers, vs. 0 new readers and 0 copies. Plus the "blatant piracy" bit is a tad more ambiguous than just that. To begin with, 99% doujin artists break current copyright law for living (vide the recent total fanart ban by Shogakukan). So they're not exactly the ones to be casting stones from their nice glass houses.

Not all art is fanart. Please don't be so blatantly dense.

Until there is actual lawsuit or series of takedown requests from Shgakukan's "ban" it's nothing more than words printed on a website.

Also, where are you getting your 0 figures from, they will still sell copies through toranoana or the retailer of their choice to residents of the country. Just because they don't increase availability to foreign users doesn't mean they suddenly can't sell to non-foreigners.

The fact that danbooru has a japanize conversion makes using this site stupidly trivial for japanese wishing to pirate japanese comics.

Log said:
Not all art is fanart. Please don't be so blatantly dense.

No, but most artists produce fanart, which is very much illegal under the current copyright law. That law is incredibly retarded, but if you're claiming piracy on one thing, you have to remember it cuts both ways.

Also, where are you getting your 0 figures from, they will still sell copies through toranoana or the retailer of their choice to residents of the country. Just because they don't increase availability to foreign users doesn't mean they suddenly can't sell to non-foreigners.

...and a link here would let the readers go there directly.

The fact that danbooru has a japanize conversion makes using this site stupidly trivial for japanese wishing to pirate japanese comics.

Of course. But they can already get scanned copies people upload regularly after events. Case in point, we did get a copy of the doujin in question somehow.

This kind of thinking is the big label / big software distributor kind of wishful thinking. "If 100 people get download my product, this means I just lost 100 × retail price of revenue", which is complete bullshit, as is just being discovered by these people. It ignores several points of human nature:

  • People who don't want to pay for your product won't. They will get it another way, or not get it all; the fraction you will "force" into paying is negligibly tiny.
  • People who want to pay for your product will if you only let them. That's regardless of the product being obtainable for free, and quite often because it's obtainable for free. I've used flattr, I've donated through paypal and bought DRM-free games like World of Goo even though they were more than trivial to pirate because they were DRM-free.
  • Laziness and sense of entitlement are powerful forces. If you make it 10x as hard to pay (click a link vs. google for a store where you can buy the thing, learn how these things work, etc.), you'll probably have 100x fewer people who get past that first step at all. And if people feel they're being forced to pay, especially when they don't feel the product deserves its price (or when they can't evaluate without having to pay up front), they will invest much more time into getting around it than the price would justify. I for one make it a point to pirate music published by big labels, even though I ordinarily try to pay for my music whenever I can afford it.
  • Which brings me to another point, "when I can afford it". People who can't give you cash often have a lot of time and can buy you a lot more publicity than they'd contribute in just the price of the product.

I don't know if you've heard of this newfangled thing called "the Internet", but it's had some pretty important effects here and there. Amongst them reducing the cost of distribution to close to zero, which suddenly allows to test a whole lot assumptions about what people will spend money on. And it turns out it's quite different than the traditional big costly middleman model would lead you to believe.

Let me attack your core argument's logic then: why do we bother complying with takedown requests at all? If it's illegal for them to produce it in the first place they have no right to ask us to take any of it down.

1. Because albert said we do. I opposed it back when it was a new thing, and I probably still would if I had any say.

alternatively

2. Because antagonising the artists is possibly more damaging in the long run. Which my proposal attempts to change by presenting an alternative that gives both sides what they want.

Re-reading everything, I may have misunderstood the main thrust. The two things here I could potentially, tentatively, support:

A simple notice on copy-written material the artist is selling and agrees not to take down: This post is a part of X which is sold at Y for $Z (¥Z). Most Japanese publishers won't export their products though, which could be a potential problem for people wanting to use this information.

A "donate to this artist" button for artists that want to tacitly allow their work on Danbooru. Though verifying and setting up the donation mechanism might be troublesome.

Anything that changes our normal operations (blocking off pages except by fee, restricting annotation, etc.) Is a very bad idea.

Denying take-down requests is also a very bad idea, because it could encourage external action against and attention to the site.

I'm still a bit wary of this whole idea, but I can see where rewarding artists that tacitly allow us to do what we do could be beneficial to the site as a whole.

I've always supported taking art down upon artist request, and here's why. As an artist, I personally know it's very hard to not be deeply hurt when your work gets placed in a situation you don't want it to be in, with nothing you can do about it. I like to think that we're appreciators, and as appreciators, we go out of our way not to hurt an artist's feelings. Though your point about copyright is certainly valid, there's a big moral difference between one and the other, in my opinion.

Anyway, I really like the idea of a list of doujinshi with a link to a purchase place, as that information is tricky to come about, and I have a feeling some of us have information that we could place on there. I'm not too sure about the idea of having a certain timer after which the doujinshi would become "open" for uploading, not because it's a bad idea (I like it), but mostly because I'm afraid it'll be met with misunderstanding and resistance from the artists. However, if we are able to communicate this idea and maybe get some artists on-board for it, then I would love it, of course.

Technically not all that much would be changed: just a purchase link, and the timed-invisible-pool thing. I don't think we need to be personally involved in the monetary transactions either, at least from how I read it. It simply links to a seller site.

Anyway I like it!

Also, I think this discussion should probably be split off from this topic.

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