ratcreature: RatCreature is dejected: sigh (sigh)
RatCreature ([personal profile] ratcreature) wrote 2010-08-23 03:44 pm (UTC)

Their official policy is:
"Fanlore's position is that the reproduction of zine covers and other fannish artwork falls constitutes a fair use under U.S. copyright law." as is said here:
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Fanlore:Copyright
(the wonky sentence structure with the verb waffling in the middle is not my fault, I just c&p'ed it like it appears on the policy page right now.)

Only the images made for Fanlore specifically are supposed to be licensed under a CC license (as I did with graphics I made for the wiki). Though right now you couldn't tell from most images pages which image has what license, i.e. nowhere on the art that's been uploaded is made clear that it is not under a CC license, nothing like what wikipedia does for non-free images.

To be fair, once the size is made much smaller so that it can't be confused with the art like I posted it anymore it's not really "archiving" as such. I can even see their point that it is kind of like uploading small covers to go with your book review and the like. But considering that my art is just a click away for anyone to see while reading a wiki article, I'd have really thought that fanlore would be so "fan-friendly" as to take preferences of fans into account. I just don't like small thumbnails of the whole image myself (that's why I always crop for the thumbnails in my posts in the outside cut teaser), but I like not getting the nice jolt of views/traffic stats (even without comments) even less, so I don't want big images somewhere where I don't get such stats.

From a practical standpoint I know why the uploading policy makes sense, like with the fanzines covers, in many cases there is no way to contact the artists many decades later, often the covers are quite small, like what you might see on book sellers pages, and I do understand the impulse to chronicle fandom including the pictures. And there are I think currently over 14,000 images on fanlore, most of them fanart. For good and bad there is no way this many would or could have been uploaded if permission for each had been required.

But I had really thought that if the fan objected later on it would be taken down. And after all my art is just a click away, so not that much more inconvenient for articles to talk about.

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