Roleplay Character/Art Theft

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Do you think Art/Character Theft is bad?

YES! BOTH!
67
88%
No! Neither!
0
No votes
Yes. Art is, but not character.
2
3%
Yes. Character is, but not Art.
1
1%
Who cares?
6
8%
 
Total votes: 76

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TheXDarkXDragoness
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Roleplay Character/Art Theft

Post by TheXDarkXDragoness »

Ok, don't be surprised if you respond and I give a big long reply. But this is a tiny post to get YOUR feedback on what you have to say about all of this Art Theft and Character Theft that roleplayers have been doing lately. If anybody doesn't know what I am talking about, I can explain it, and why it is bad. I just get very angry because when people find out it is wrong they still do it. :/ >.<

So basically, here is what is going on. Many roleplayers are going to Google, finding a picture of a person or character, then using it. That is against copyright! The copyright of the artist/photographer since they did not give permission out and are not given credit. Then, for characters, there is character theft. It does not belong to them in these cases. They take somebodies art and character, claim it as theirs, and give no credit whatsoever. This is NOT against roleplayers, but I think there is a problem with Art/Character theft. These are copyrighted characters! The art clearly takes MUCH time by the artist, and the characters are great. That, however, does not make it free to use.

I think roleplayers should either describe their characters instead, use characters and art that is theirs, use art that they have rights too, or use a free to use character.

What is you opinion?
Last edited by TheXDarkXDragoness on February 18th, 2015, 2:58:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Roleplay Character/Art Theft

Post by Morgaln »

I think you need to back up a little and put down what you actually want to discuss. You're starting with a foregone conclusion (roleplayers are stealing art and characters) and expect people to accept that as true before they even post here. That makes it pretty much impossible to have an unbiased discussion.

How about you first explain in detail what issues you see and what effects you think it has? That way other people will be able to come in and share their experiences on the matter even if they differ from yours.
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Re: Roleplay Character/Art Theft

Post by TheXDarkXDragoness »

Fixed. :D
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Re: Roleplay Character/Art Theft

Post by Sinh »

Of course you are right in one thing: It is not ok to just find a random image on the internet and then post it somewhere, claiming that this is your character and whatever. I've also seen roleplayers do it a lot, especially in certain places (not on here though).
This is a real problem and I believe that it is very important to educate the people doing it.

This is in my opinion one of the more harmless forms of copyright infringement you get on the internet though. The people doing it are, in my experience, usually just being thoughtless. They are not trying to make money and usually not even claiming the artwork as their own. In the best case they will get to the point where their characters develop some real character and therefore demand some artwork of their own.
I'm not saying that this kind of behaviour shouldn't be called out. Education is needed here, but there may be more problematic things to get worked up about.

I believe that, like many of the problems with people and the internet in general, this issue arises because nobody seems to understand that posting something publicly on a public website is an act of publishing. We see nothing wrong with children loving the illustrations in their fairytale book and pretending to be that cool princess or the mighty dragon in their games. I don't think we would be worried if they did this with random images from the internet either (except that one shouldn't send young children picture hunting on their own, for obvious reasons) nor should we blame adults for having that kind of harmless fun.
The point is: Would you repeat a claim like that in print? In a book that was to be published? I bet most people wouldn't, but for some reason they never think twice before posting such things on their favourite roleplay forum.
If only people understood that kind of thing as the act of publishing it is, many problems would probably solve themselves.

With artwork, the case is clear: Every particular piece of artwork is protected by copyright and that means (among other things) that the artist gets to decide who can post it where. Using it without their permission is never ok.

Characters are a whole different matter though. Things are much more complex here:
How different must a character be to be a different character? Surely being based off the same image as a source of inspiration will not make two characters identical?
If my character is a half demon with purple eyes and so is yours, is that a case of theft? I wouldn't say so, especially for the more common, cliché types. Things are bound to return, especially if they're not very detailed and/or original.
I would not want to be the judge when claims of "character theft" come up. Just trying to say: this is not an easy case. I'd be very interested to hear the opinions of people who have experienced this, because I have not: Characters so developed and original that they could be recognized if they were copied, are usually too complex to be easy to just grab and play. I'd be surprised if someone willing to invest that kind of energy into getting to know a character wouldn't take time to ask the character's creator (or just create his own for that matter). I'm obviously not talking fan works here, but that is a different matter altogether.

One thing that's strange about both issues: Why would anyone think it was a good idea to just take artwork/characters off the internet? Surely both would make people less likely to want to rp with you in any case, right?
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Re: Roleplay Character/Art Theft

Post by Raneth »

I'm actually curious about all this because I can't seem to wrap my head around art and its uses and such. I feel like things get into thorny grey areas very quickly. For example:

Someone uses an image off of a stock photo website for a project, or gets it through a royalty-free website (say, shutterstock). Let's say they use it in a collage. Then someone else decides to copy the image from the collage and use it for something else. It's still a royalty-free image, so is there harm there in using it if its been paid for once? Who owns the rights to the collage image, shutterstock or the collage-maker? How do people prevent the image from getting paid for once and then propogating all over the internet?

If there's a photo just sitting out there on the internet with no information about artist/photographer or anything, how does one figure out if its free to use or not?

What about reference images? If someone, say, decides that their character looks really similar to a certain image, can they post that as a reference and say "this looks similar" and leave it at that without claiming any ownership of the image? Or does the reference image have to be something the person owns?

Can someone take a piece of art and completely re-imagine it in a large enough way that it becomes something new? Like taking a photograph and using it as the reference for a sketch or something? What if they take the photo and use a program to "sketchify" it? When is it okay versus not okay?

Art confuses me.

As for characters, I think there's a pretty obvious line between inspiration from another character and outright copying. I don't think I've ever run into a situation where I've seen characters get outright "stolen" and brought into someone else's story. Then again, this might be more of an issue in roleplay versus fiction writing.
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Re: Roleplay Character/Art Theft

Post by TheXDarkXDragoness »

First off I'd also like to say that MLP, SAO, and other widely distributed things are generally considered free, and they are there for that. But as far as characters being similar, you can't take a deviantART artist character because it looks similar because that art simply belongs to that character, making it character theft tall over again. It is a very complex thing, but imagine the number of victims there are EVERY DAY. People who put hours into each character or piece of art, every photographer who paid a lot of money to be able to take that award-winning shot. Once one person takes it, another person who liked it may use it too until it is virtually unstoppable and you have lost all of that hard work for nothing. What then?
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Re: Roleplay Character/Art Theft

Post by Saria »

Sinh wrote:Characters are a whole different matter though. Things are much more complex here:
How different must a character be to be a different character? Surely being based off the same image as a source of inspiration will not make two characters identical?
If my character is a half demon with purple eyes and so is yours, is that a case of theft? I wouldn't say so, especially for the more common, cliché types. Things are bound to return, especially if they're not very detailed and/or original.
I would not want to be the judge when claims of "character theft" come up. Just trying to say: this is not an easy case. I'd be very interested to hear the opinions of people who have experienced this, because I have not: Characters so developed and original that they could be recognized if they were copied, are usually too complex to be easy to just grab and play. I'd be surprised if someone willing to invest that kind of energy into getting to know a character wouldn't take time to ask the character's creator (or just create his own for that matter). I'm obviously not talking fan works here, but that is a different matter altogether.
Ah...a friend asked me to respond to this since you said you were interested in hearing what people who had experienced this thought about it...maybe this isn't exactly what you were thinking of but I have had a roleplay character stolen before. It's probably not that surprising, since I've travelled across many sites, roleplaying my way across the internet.
I know you say that it can be hard to tell because some features are commonly shared - like eye colour - but I know theft was the case because it was my own writing, my own work. It almost perfectly word for word except minor changes such as name, and one word was changed to be a misspelling.

The character in question I had spent years developing, even down to the tiny details - the ways they'd fidget when agitated, their morals, both standard and conflicting, their world view, what their favourite breakfast was, why they did what they did, their favourite food and why they liked it, even the details of how their parents acted and behaved, as the actions and mannerisms of parents can influence their children. Then when applying for a roleplay, I spent several days writing the application form, trying to make it perfect and include every last drop of detail I could include in the form while keeping the flow for reading, and not making it disjointed or too oversaturated. And then a while later, maybe months or even a year, I was browsing roleplays and spotted one that seemed to have themes that interested me. So I was rather surprised when I spotted that the owner of said roleplay had that exact form of mine for one of their characters. The only changes were their name, age and appearance - cut down from my detailed paragraphs to a tiny sliver that didn't even match the flow or style of the rest of the form. But everything from the town they were born in, their parents' mannerisms, their hobbies and entire life story including when they left school and where they moved to, what job they started as and their career history beyond that, it was all exactly the same. Other users in that roleplay were complimenting the user on that form, and the user was proudly boasting about how much effort they put into it, and how it took them such a long time - only a few hours. Thankfully, I had proof and managed to get the help of one of the forum's moderators to help me and get the form removed from their thread. The user didn't show any remorse or even apologise to me, and I can tell you it was very upsetting. I even managed to find the user on a different forum hosting the same roleplay under a different name and using my form there too - unfortunately, when I contacted moderators there and supplied proof, they promised to look into the situation but never actually did anything about it.

So yeah...that's my experience. Not all character thieves will bother trying to get to know characters - most will steal your work that you may have spent years on, then alter a few details to try and throw off the trail and then utterly mess up their characterisation, all because they liked a form you wrote and wanted to claim they wrote it. I can't say I understand the mindset myself, but there are those out there who will steal without investing time in learning the character.
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Re: Roleplay Character/Art Theft

Post by TheXDarkXDragoness »

Very true. When I catch a thief who doesn't know what they are doing, I calmly and kindly tell then to stop. I have heard everything from "But it IS mine" to "What does it even matter? People do it all the time" to deleting the post angerly. It really is bothering.
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Re: Roleplay Character/Art Theft

Post by Sinh »

Saria wrote: [...]
I know you say that it can be hard to tell because some features are commonly shared - like eye colour - but I know theft was the case because it was my own writing, my own work. It almost perfectly word for word except minor changes such as name, and one word was changed to be a misspelling.

[...]

So yeah...that's my experience. Not all character thieves will bother trying to get to know characters - most will steal your work that you may have spent years on, then alter a few details to try and throw off the trail and then utterly mess up their characterisation, all because they liked a form you wrote and wanted to claim they wrote it. I can't say I understand the mindset myself, but there are those out there who will steal without investing time in learning the character.
Thank you for sharing. I'm very sorry to hear that something like this happened to you. People who are roleplayers themselves should have some understanding of what a character means to their player and it is really unsettling to think that there are still some who would deliberately steal someone elses work like that. And have the guts to repeat the process on another website at that.
Perhaps the people who really need some consciousness raising about this kind of thing are the admins of the forums where that kind of thing happens.

While what you are describing is clearly a case of theft, and not a harmless one, I'm still hesitant to call it character theft though. I take it that the fact that this character of yours was taken was the worst part for you, but what made it possible for you to prove that this person had taken it from you, was that they'd directly copied your writing. There is clearly a case of plain old plagiarism involved here and I wonder if this person would have been able to pull off the character theft without plagiarizing at all. Clearly they wouldn't have been able to play the character while keeping them in character, right? Would they have been able to write up a form describing your character in enough detail to really characterize them without copying your writing?

TheXDarkXDragoness wrote:First off I'd also like to say that MLP, SAO, and other widely distributed things are generally considered free, and they are there for that. But as far as characters being similar, you can't take a deviantART artist character because it looks similar because that art simply belongs to that character, making it character theft tall over again. It is a very complex thing, but imagine the number of victims there are EVERY DAY. People who put hours into each character or piece of art, every photographer who paid a lot of money to be able to take that award-winning shot. Once one person takes it, another person who liked it may use it too until it is virtually unstoppable and you have lost all of that hard work for nothing. What then?
I don't really understand what you're saying here. Would you mind clarifying? Are you saying that MLP, as in My Little Pony, the tv show, is considered free, because it's widely distributed, but some random person's character art is not?
As a matter of fact, all of those widely distributed things, inculding all tv shows, video games and books are usually trademarked and a trademark makes using these things a whole lot more problematic than copyright alone would. The companies holding the trademark will usually encourage fanworks of course. You don't go around suing your fans anyway, it's bad style and bad for business. That doesn't mean that everything being done there is ok though. People selling Pokemon fanart commissions (I've seen that happen on DA a lot) is cleary commercial use and that is not quite legal.
There have been cases of artists being extremely protective of their characters and ready to sue their fans as well. I remember a warning being issued on a fantasy gallery site several years ago, concerning the works of Anne McCaffrey. All illustrations of characters or creatures from her books had to be clearly labeled as fanart and appended with a certain kind of copyright notice. See here for the homepage of an artist who was supposedly in contact with the lady's lawyer.

Is the point you're trying to make a moral one? Do you believe that somehow the small artist has more of a personal connection to their character that is more worthy of protection than it would be, if it were commercially distributed?
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Re: Roleplay Character/Art Theft

Post by TheXDarkXDragoness »

I'm saying if you went and posted a picture of Fluttershy from MLP, it is not theft because it is a widely distributed show, and that is a thing to be expected when you are a widespread company. Think. If MLP fans are not allowed to write fanstories and draw the characters and post their pictures they have 0 fanbase now. But personal characters are not meant to become spread out, and are for personal use only. Widely distributed characters are not personal characters. Commercial characters are followed by a separate set of rules than personal ones.
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