fannish etiquette question

[ratcreature]

With the proliferation of Tumblr, what do you do if another fan just reblogs your pictures? I understand that one of the reasons people like Tumblr is because it is so easy to just post a bunch of pictures and video and such, but I do have a notice that I don't want my art distributed without permission, because I'd rather like traffic to come to my site than some random Tumblr or other site. (This seems to be an ongoing problem for me of late.) Am I just behind on the new fannish normal?

Comments

[ratcreature]

Yeah. Like I said in a comment above, I don't want to come across as exceptionally prissy about using my art, and this Tumblr credited and linked back (that's how I noticed in the first place), so I don't want to be a jerk to people. But otoh I'd still rather get my own traffic and control picture distribution. I mean, as far as you can with people just "finding" pictures through google, but I mean this is from within the same corner of fandom I'm in. And it seems only fanart is "fair game", not fanfic for example.

[cofax7]

And it seems only fanart is "fair game", not fanfic for example

I wonder why that is. Because more people write fanfiction, and thus there's a broader understanding/empathy for the creator's rights to it? Because fanfiction is more susceptible to plagiarism (by way of the global S&R of character names)? Because we've had more time to struggle with it, since only in the last five or eight years has it become really easy for people to host images?

I also wonder about the fannish socialization of the people who are reposting the art: are they people embedded in a fannish community with a developed protocol for respecting creators' interests? Do they come from a fannish community that just doesn't think about fanart as being an individual's personal creation? Or are they entirely unfamiliar with fannish social norms in general, and think the art is magically produced by rats on the internet and no one could possibly have an issue with their reproduction of it in a form they prefer?

Hmmm.

[ratcreature]

Well, I don't have representative sample, probably because I'm not all that prolific, posting fanart only rarely, and also art isn't that popular or of great quality (I mean, there's worse, but I'm not one of the high profile artists with 3000+ LJ followers or 100000+ dA page views), so I'm not reposted all over the place as some artists, just every now and then I notice because I vanity google and look at who linked to me and such.

But in the instance that kicked off this post, the Tumblr owner also has an LJ and I recognized the pseud vaguely, not from flist/dwircle directly, but someone whom I've seen around in comic comms every now and then.

I think in part is that in fandom there is a lot of respect for crediting text (like when someone puts a bunch of quotes in their fanfic without proper citation you get wailing and gnashing about plagiarism right away, even if it's just some lines), but as in online culture at large there is almost no respect for images, and no culture of proper image sourcing in casual/non-professional contexts. Images are "found" on google and used for macros with funny texts without giving the photo source, icons are made and only the icon maker is credited not the original photographer and artist (that's so bad that even if you draw your icons yourself people automatically assume it is not your art but that you've taken it from somewhere, as I've encounter often with my icons), and so on. So it is reinforced over and over that you have to be really careful with text but images are okay to grab.

And in part it's convenience, that when people want to show someone else a cool fanfic they've read they rec/link the fic, and it's tedious to c&p pages and pages of text, but when they want to show a cool image they just show the image directly, and now you don't have to hotlink, but tumblr and the other current photo hosts allow all that with one click.