Anonymous2: Yeah, Oni's gone the "porn for profit" route these days. About 90% of his stuff is now being submitted exclusively to Hentai United now (a pay site). Other sites like Hentai Foundry just get edited teasers like this. But don't fret. I'm sure someone'll get the GOOD version off the site and post it here eventually.
Anonymous4: I do like how the face is drawn. I prefer old Cheetara to new cos she looks too young in the newer one but here she looks a lil bit older and looks far hotter for it.
Anonymous5(3): T_virus, I was being sarcastic. The econ is in the shitter, yet there are more paysites than ever, as if these artists think we all have money to be tossing around for porn.
I'M ON YOUR SIDE FOOL.
Anonymous6: Getting real fucking tired of Oni censoring his own art these days. How the fuck do you go from free stuff for years to censoring and cockteasing stuff? That's exactly why I don't feel bad every time someone gets a hold of some of his uncensored stuff and posts it for free here. I absolutely loathe that people like Oni want us to pay for hentai. Real porn I can understand, but fucking drawn pictures of Cheetara completely naked I have to pay for? No thanks.
Anonymous10: Actually Anon2, it's 50%. There's a new uncensored pic every Monday (the same production rate as before), and a new BONUS HU promo every Wednesday, which is twice as much total work as before.
And Anon6, these pics take hours of work to produce, you should be extremely grateful of any artist that produces any art that they allow you to see for free. Would you be willing to do your job for several hours and not get paid for it?
And Anon7/8, Just a clarification, an artist retains 100% full copyright of the work THEY produce, whether or not it features a parody of a character that is owned by someone else.
false analogy. more like "would you be willing to do your job for several hours and not get paid for it directly by every single person who ever gets pleasure from it?"
for almost everybody else in the world, the answer is yes, you would. you get paid by one person/company, who commissions you to do the work, even though many others may benefit.
so, the proper and moral compensation plan for artists is commission, selling prints advertising, or asking for tips. not holding their art hostage and saying "yeah it's there, but even though it doesn't cost me any more time or effort now that it's done whether you see it or not, you don't get to see it unless you pay me"
Anonymous11(10): Craggle, if you work as a fry cook at McDonalds, you do get paid by everyone who enjoys your work. They pay the tiller for their meal, and the manager pays you from the tiller. Same thing here, everyone who legally enjoys the full version pays HU to see it, HU pays the artists.
Now, as for the rest of your argument, poppycock. Yes, commissions and such are ONE way of earning money on a piece, but this is another, equally valid one. It's more like a comic book or a song or a movie, you do the work on spec, and the idea is that people later pay to enjoy it. If people don't end up paying to enjoy it, then you've clearly wasted your time in bothering and aren't likely to do it again.
The benefit from the consumer's perspective is that you get more bang for your buck. Instead of paying $70+ to get a single image, you're paying less than half that to get access to dozens of images from Oni, as well as hundreds from the other artists on the site. The costs of producing the work get spread out over multiple customers, as if 3-4 of them chipped in to have a single piece produced, so it ends up being cheaper for each of them while returning the same rewards.
Now, if a pic is on HU, it's there because nobody commissioned it (he doesn't post any commissions to HU). If anyone does want to commission a pic of Cheetara from Oni, I'm sure he'd do it, and with their permission make it free for everyone to see, as he does with his Monday pics, but since nobody has, this is the only way that this pic would come into being. Without the prospect of earning back the time investment, I'm sure he'd rather be playing a videogame or something. He wasn't just cranking out all this art and then suddenly decided to start charging people to view it.
craggle: ah, but you don't, a11. you get paid by the manager to do your job. it doesn't matter if you get one customer that day, or 600, you get paid hourly. (of course, if you keep getting no customers, you'll probably be out of a job, but that's a different issue). and if you serve somebody fries, and they give those fries to a friend, the friend doesn't have to pay you. and the fry cook is at least doing more work the more people order their fries. the artist isn't doing any more work if they get a hundred thousand people viewing their pics.
that's how it works for most of the world. you get paid to do your job. i was responding to the ridiculous argument that the HU shit is fair because "you expect to be paid for your work, don't you?". except what they're demanding is that they produce one batch of fries and everybody who has it has to pay full price.
that's just dumb. and the bang for the buck on paysites is shit compared to most media (where, when you pay, you usually get a physical object. i think paying for digital files is shit, too). it's a better deal than commissions, yes, but in commissions you're paying a premium for control. an artist could also make money by demanding that he reach a certain number in tips before he makes a new piece. that's fair. but again, i don't like it when artists hold their art hostage. then they become just commercial saleswhores.
so, yeah, i still say it's a shitty way for an artist to make money. now, i want them to make money. but i want them to do it in a way that's good for everybody.
now, i do have an exception to the "it's a shitty way for artists to operate" policy, and that's if they have exclusivity be a temporary thing, or has extra perks like a ultra-high-quality-size. you want to see it right away, or in high-def, it's pay, but after 6 months everybody can see an average-size picture. that's a fair way to do it.
Anonymous13(10): Yes, but craggle, if not enough people come into the shop to justify your wages then you get fired, his salary is based on the assumption that X number of customers will be buying his product, and that's not a separate issue. Likewise, if not enough people sign up for HU under Oni's name then he wouldn't make enough money to justify the time it takes to produce those additional pieces, and he'd stop, going back to one new piece per week instead of two.
And yes, the artist isn't doing more work if he gets hundredws of thousands of people to view the image, but let's be fair, he probably isn't getting hundreds of thousands of sign-ups out of this. It's probably more like a half-dozen per piece he puts out.
But ok, let's leave the fry cook out of this, how about someone who writes a book? They write a book and put it on the market. Each person that buys a copy of that book adds to the royalty that the writer receives for doing it, directly. Do writers not deserve royalties? Should they just get a flat fee to write the book, whether they sell ten or ten thousand copies?
As for paying for digital, that's your choice to make. Nobody is forcing you to buy any product you don't want, and if you don't feel HU is worth your money then don't sign up. And better an artist become a "commercial salewhore" than broke.
Now, ok, you say that you want the artist to make money, but in a way that's good for everybody. Fine. How then? Assuming that commissions alone can't cut it, because the amount that the artist would have to charge to make a living off of commissions would be well above what most people could afford to pay, what would you suggest as a "fair" way for the artist to make money off his art?
The "high-def" or "six month delay" things might sound nice, but it would probably result in far less interest in the site, as most customers would have no problem with a smaller image (I shrink most large images down anyways), and a delay wouldn't be a huge deal if you were guaranteed to get it for free later. That just wouldn't work.
craggle: and, if true, the reason he's not getting many sign ups is because the pay-monthly model is a shitty model that most people hate.
again, by comparing art with art you're missing the fucking point. this argument started because somebody said "how would you like it if you did your job and nobody paid you", but that's not what artists are doing. they demand to be treated differently from everybody else. they say "i did this work, now everyone who enjoys it has to pay me individually the same amount in order to benefit from it"
and let's not pretend that what Oni does is just like the movie people or book people do are the same, anyway. one of the reasons people rail against pay sites is that the value for money is shit. i can pay $3 and get a book full of images the same quality as oni's, and i actually get a book i get to keep. meanwhile, most paysites, they charge you a monthly fee of $20 or something and you get, maybe, a handful of images a month. sometimes, you don't get anything at all. if an artist doesn't want to, they can just not do anything new for months on end and people will continue to pay. oni, i'll grant you, is doing pretty good by his subscribers so far (the value for money is still shit, but it's less shit than a lot of other such sites), but at any time he could descide to slack off.
that's shit. in other media, the done-on-spec, get-paid-afterwards model work because the cost of buying a copy is tiny compared to the cost to produce it.
if i want somebody to make a movie to my specifications, i have to lay out, at least, $100,000 probably (and many millions if it's anything i'd actually want to see). but if i want to buy any old movie, i pay maybe $10. less than 1%. now, if i want an artist to draw what i want, let's say $70. but if i want to access any old picture they have, they insist i have to pay $20, a little less than a third. fuck that. the value for money is shit. and i can't buy just one picture, i have to buy access to whatever he decides he wants to put out. that's like saying if i want to buy start wars, i have to pay $20 million dollars a month to get access to everything george lucas ever made.
if an artist can't make money enough money off commissions, advertising, or tip jars, the market's spoken.
but i don't respect the paysite model at all. it's holding your art hostage until everybody who wants to see it pays. you give out teases of "hey, you like this? it already exists. you want to see it? well, then you pay, even though you're not getting anything tangible, even though i'm not doing any more work, and even though (in this case) these aren't even my own characters." i don't respect that, and an artist who does it doesn't respect me. and so i won't abide by any restrictions, i won't pay their stupid fee, i'll pirate the art freely and share it freely, because if the artist had integrity, they'd do the same, and anything that helps the bullshit 'pay monthly to access' business model fail is a good in and of itself. if an artist behaves in a way i think is fair, i'll be fair back.
Anonymous14(10): Craggle, I don't disagree that the paysite is not the most ideal model, but there aren't any better ones that are open to hentai artists. The advertising available blows for hentai art. It's all super sketchy porn sites, and nobody wants to see those ads. I'd hate to go anywhere near an advertising supported hentai artist, if such a thing is even possible. As for donations, again, the reputable donation sites don't deal with pron, so that's out too. In a sense, the HU site is a bit like a donation jar, just one that has a set price to it that takes care of the exorbitant middlemen involved (much less and the money-handlers would eat the entire sum).
As for the quality for the money thing, it's all relative, it's all what the product is worth to you. If the site is not worth it to you, then you don't have to sign up, just as if a 2-hour movie isn't worth $10 then you don't have to go to the theater and if 10-minute comic isn't worth it to you you don't have to pay $3 for the comic. That doesn't mean that you should complain to the theater for not letting you in for free, it just means that you shouldn't watch the movie you don't feel is worth the investment.
As to HU specifically, Oni's committed to at least one new exclusive image per week, which he posts promos of so you know what you'll be getting, and also the occasional alternate version. You also get to see the artwork from the other artists, which amounts to a dozen or so other pics per week, give or take.
And of course if the artists slack off, you don't have to keep paying.
I also don't think Oni would ever charge $20 for ONE old pic, the monthly fee gives you access to every pic he's done for the site (21 so far), and every pic the other artists have done too (hundreds in total). Yes, it's a bundle thing, but that's just for convenience. I'm sure if you emailed him he'd be willing to let just ONE pic go for considerably less than $20.
"hey, you like this? it already exists. you want to see it? well, then you pay, "
Again, HU is far from the first to do this. That would probably be the nickelodeon theaters at the turn of the century or something. What do you think a commercial/trailer for a movie or an HBO program is? They already made the movie, they give you a taste of it so that you'll be interested enough to pay for the full thing, and then they expect anyone interested to pay to go see it. If nobody was willing to pay to go see movies, then there would be no movie industry. The best we'd get is the occasional personal project that would suck.
"if an artist behaves in a way i think is fair, i'll be fair back. "
No, you won't, you're just coming up with bullshit reasons to be cheap. Don't try to tart it up like you have principles.
craggle: no, i have a point of view that is different from yours. i truly don't believe this is the way an artist should behave to make money, and more importantly, i don't believe they should whine, or people should whine on their behalf, about not getting paid for their hard work, when they have other options. they might not like them, they may not make as much, but they're there, and they don't play bullshit games with their fans.
i won't get too into other forms of media, but again, most of the time, you're either paying for a performance occuring at a specific place/time (a movie theatre) with limited capacity, or you're paying for a physical object, and in most cases, if you're willing to wait a while, they'll give it to you free or practically so later (ad-supported, but that's fair). all of which puts them in a different category from what erotic artists try to do. when they're not put in a different category, like for digital copies of shit that doesn't cost anything to produce and you get nothing physical in return, i have the exact same opinion, it's a bullshit way to make money that i will not support. if something costs nothing to copy or display, i will not pay money for it unless i truly think it's worth it to reward the author themselves, through a tip. and if they DEMAND money for it, then i'm even less likely to. and if they demand money for it at a stupidly high rate compared to what it costs to have a fresh piece produced to order, then i'm even less likely to (i might still commission, because that's a fair way to make a buck). i don't care if it cost money or effort to produce, that's not my problem. find a better way to make the money.
that's my opinion anyway, and i think the opinion of many others. you don't agree, good for fucking you, but i don't feel the need to discuss it any more.
Anonymous15(10): @ Craggle, Your having differing opinion doesn't mean you're justified in holding it. Wrong is wrong, even if your opinion is that wrong is right. Also, you say that artists should not complain when they "have other options," but in this case there aren't other options, so that point is invalid. Any other options you think they have are not actually valid options, due to the unfortunate nature of Hentai and the Internet in our hypocritical and puritanical society.
Anonymous16(10): Also, I don't think anyone minds that you choose not to sign up with the site, the problem is how you complain about it, and about how you feel entitled to have the art without paying for it. If you were just content to NOT have the art that you were not willing to pay for then it would be a non-issue.
Anonymous17(10): Nobody is demanding anything of you, you do not have to spend anything, but if you take advantage of his services by viewing art that he produced to not be displayed for free, then you do owe him the money he asked for for that right.
Anonymous18(10): You can't just walk into a diner, eat a full meal, and then complain that you shouldn't be have to spend money for it. If you don't want to be charged, don't sit down at the table and eat the food.
craggle: a18 is a fucking idiot who thinks that a limited resource that requires effort to produce EVERY INSTANCE OF is the same and should be treated the same as a non-limited resource that can be copied and distributed by anybody. that's retarded on the face of it. the more you use retarded examples like that, the less i respect your argument. if you still can't grasp this, there's no point in continuing. wrong is wrong, as you say, and you are wrong and unjustified in holding your opinion.
i owe nothing for something which costs nothing to reproduce and that i didn't agree to pay for in advance. even if it costs something to produce, i owe nothing if i didn't agree, not even to remove it or not look at it. if a man painted my house without permission, he couldn't demand i pay him $100 for his time and effort. he couldn't even demand i repaint the house, or not look at it, because otherwise i'd be enjoying his work without payment. we never made an agreement, i have no obligation to him. if he painted my neighbor's house, and i liked that color, and decided to copy the color on my own house, he has no right to tell me that i have to pay him too because i'm enjoying the same color house as my neighbor, because it cost him nothing to produce that color.
if an artist wanted to say "give me $50 or i won't draw this", that's fair. if he wanted to say "every time i reach $100 in tips, i'll make a new piece", that's fair. in those cases, he's demanding money in exchange for work, the basis of any economy. but once it exists, he'd better be offering something beyond the right to view it if he's going to charge money. sell a signed printed version of it shipped in the mail. sell a sketchbook.
and there are always other options for artists to make money. they might just not make as much. but boo-hoo. i don't make as much as i'd like for my job, either. i'd love more. but i'm not going to do something shitty and unethical like charge extra money for nothing to make up for it, like artists who go pay-monthly do. find a more honorable way to make more money from your art. if you can't, you're either not smart enough, just not as good an artist as you think you are and you were already making the amount of money you deserve through commissions.
Anonymous19: If you release anything in a digital format, you should have no expectation to profit off of it. How an attractive and successful African gonna claim sole control over the reproduction and distribution of something that can be copied a thousand times over with the click of a button? If I created a machine that could clone Oreos, should Nabisco be able to sue me?
Anonymous20(10): Craggle, they aren't the same thing, but some rules apply to both. Whether it's in limited quantity or not, the person that does the work has the right to decide how and when the efforts of that work is used. If the person that created the art offers it for free, that's his right. If he asks for a cover charge to view it, that's his right. If he chooses to keep it to himself and not let anyone see it, that's also his right. At no point do you have the right to dictate what his distribution policy should be.
"i owe nothing for something which costs nothing to reproduce and that i didn't agree to pay for in advance. "
Each reproduction costs nothing, but the original piece of art cost time and effort to produce. That cost is meant to be divided evenly amongst those that view it. By viewing it, you're defacto agreeing that you owe him for the privilege, even if you don't then honor that obligation.
As for your house painter example, that's far more irrelevant than any I've used. Oni did not "paint your house without permission." He clearly set up the terms of this situation, "you sign up with HU, you get to view the image." YOU were the one that chose to circumvent that rule. To borrow your painter analogy, it would not be the painter painting your house without permission, it would be you hiring the painter to come over and paint your house, and then refusing the agreed upon price when he'd finished.
As for your "every time i reach $100 in tips, i'll make a new piece" stance, that's just being factitious. That's no different than what he's doing now, except that he's doing the work on spec. It's "I'm doing the piece, make it have been worth it and I'll make another, and so on." The only difference is that your version would allow you to continue freeloading because it would not require that you ever pay into it.
That's what it all boils down to, end of the day. You're too cheap to contribute, and will latch on to any justification to allow you to continue to benefit without having to be a part of supporting the work you're enjoying.
craggle: "Whether it's in limited quantity or not, the person that does the work has the right to decide how and when the efforts of that work is used."
i reject that principle, and substitute my own.
my principle is "if you can give many people pleasure by doing no extra work or giving up nothing tangible, to demand money from all the people who might enjoy, or to do anything to impede others from doing it is immoral." there are subtleties i won't get into, a couple things which aren't tangible which might apply, but that's it at its most basic level. i'm even willing to be generous and include "the effort of uploading it somewhere" as work (so you could make a valid business model where you draw the piece and demand a certain amount of money before it gets released).
yes, corporations do it all the time, but i don't expect morality from corporations.
that is the difference between saying "i'll do the work if i reach a certain amount of money", and saying "the work's already done, but if you want to enjoy it, pay up."
as to your assertion that we made a defacto agreement, fuck that. de facto agreements are shit, because i did not agree. okay, by reading this artistically designed post we've now made a de facto agreement that you will give me all your money for the rest of your life. i suppose since you believe you should honor de facto agreements, you should honor this one. please get to work though, because i want more of your money.
by the way, that agreement goes for everyone who reads the post, not just you, even though it was designed for you.
that's what you're saying oni or other artists are doing, after all.
and again, you make a stupid, retarded assertion that makes no sense. i'm referring to your one about "the person that does the work has the right to decide how and when the efforts of the work is used." if i created a recipe and sold it in a book, i have no right to decide that you can't make it if you live in europe, because i don't like smelly europeans. or that you can't make it on thursdays. if i make a cartoon, i have no right to say you can't draw the characters into porn, and if you or oni truly believed it, they'd have a lot less to draw and make no money at all (why aren't they too 'cheap' to produce their own characters in your view?). and if i paint your house a pretty color, i have no right to say that nobody else is allowed to look at the efforts of my work without paying. fuck, if i paint MY house a pretty color, i still have no right to say that.
what it boils down to at the end of the day is you're defending somebody who is immoral for the sake of money. oh, and you're retarded, because you assume everyone is like you and everything is about money. and also because you've come up with a position you can't logically defend, you just keep making stupid arguments that do not apply and are easily demolished.
no, this not about being cheap. it's about a principle i believe in. i do contribute to things i believe in, when they don't behave immorally, and i think they're worth it. and i'll be completely honest... with oni, i like his work, but i probably wouldn't contribute to him directly either, it doesn't reach that threshold. kind of like how with some movies i'd enjoy watching them on tv, but not buy the movie. that's not the case with everybody, though. and there are times when i find i have to contribute to people/causes that do behave immorally to get something i want. but when i don't have to, i won't. and that's why i don't pay and will freely pirate anything that is produced on a basis of immorality. it's not about being cheap, it's about having a different philosophy than you. you're free to continue to hold your view, i won't respect it, but i'll respect your right to have it.
since you've proven yourself incapable of understanding simple logic by making faulty comparisons and stupid assertions again and again, i will no longer be replying to you (at least anything longer than a sentence). unless, of course, you decided to put your money where your mouth is and honor our de facto agreement. then we might still have some talking to do.
Anonymous21(10): Yes, but your principle doesn't matter. The only principle that matters is the artist's principle because he's the one that created the art. When YOU create art, you can apply your principle to that art, but you can't apply your own rules to someone else's art any more than you could apply your own principles to someone else's couch and just say "I'll be taking this, because by my principles you don't deserve to have ownership of it."
You don't seem to understand the point of the art being produced here. This is not art that is going to get produced either way, and he's greedily asking for money on top of that. This is art that is ONLY being produced on the expectation that it will eventually get paid for, much like doing a commission without requiring payment up front (or ordering food at a place that doesn't give you the bill until after you've eaten).
If it makes you feel any better about it, don't think if it as being asked to pay for the existing pic, think of it as being asked to pay for the next pic down the line, or the one after that, or the dozens that he will hopefully be producing over the next year, because you have to understand that if it stops making money then the work would stop flowing.
Unless of course your justifications are bullshit and you're just trying to make an excuse for not paying at all, in which case, carry on.
Your "defacto agreement" argument is crap too. There is no "entrapment" in this, the pictures are put behind a pay wall, if you breach that pay wall to get to them, you know what you're engaged in. It's like if someone steals someone's TV, and then sells it on a street corner. Maybe you didn't steal that TV yourself, but you would still be buying stolen property, and that's a crime too.
Your whole "immoral" argument is even more preposterous. You haven't made the case for that at all, and just saying it repeatedly doesn't make it true.
craggle: your reply, consisting of irrelevant statements and once again using examples conflating actual goods with immaterial and costlessly reproducable material, has convinced me that there is not only a fundamental difference of opinion, but also that you are a high-level fucktard, and thus i shall waste no more time than this one sentence, as promised.
Anonymous22: tbh i think its stupid to try and make people pay for porn on the internet... seriously, why pay 25$ for something you can find just as good few clicks away?
Anonymous23(10): Anon 22, that's your choice, but it doesn't justify taking the content from the site you don't see a justification for paying for, and then putting it up someplace for free against the will of the person that did the actual work for it. It's rude to the artist, and it's rude to anyone who did actually support their work.
Anonymous24: Anon23: Fuck off. Oni is taking copyrighted characters, baring their tits, and suddenly it's his work.
If people insist on using the fast food analogy, that's like putting up a fast food stand with McDonalds emblazoned on the site, but not actually pay anything to the franchise.
In both cases you're relying on the existing customer base, the advertising and support they've built up over the years, to sell your knockoffs.
soheifox: ... I like to side with artists in most cases, but Anon 24 is correct. Oni is profiting off of someone else's work. While producing this sort of thing is a legal grey area, selling this sort of thing is absolutely not.
Anonymous25(10): Actually, anon 24 and Soheifox are wrong. While porn parody itself is a bit of a gray area (if it's ruled as parody it's 100% legal, if not, it's 100% illegal), whether the artist profits off of it or not makes absolutely NO difference, legally speaking.
Legally, it doesn't matter even a little bit whether the artist charges money for it or not. If the porn parodies on HU are illegal, then EVERYTHING on Rule 34 is EXACTLY as illegal, and pretty much everything here would need to be taken down.
In any case, it's not up for anyone here to judge the legality of it or not, until such time as a judge officially rules on whether a given work is parody or not, there is a presumption of innocence.
As to the argument that artists don't deserve to profit by using copyrighted characters, that's just childish bull-pucky. The art these guys produce is original work, whether it used copyrighted characters or not. Sure, they could put the same effort towards a character nobody's ever heard of, but the results wouldn't be nearly as fun for anyone. Would you really prefer that Oni go from drawing characters like Cheetara to drawing a "nobody" character in the same pose? Would you really enjoy that more as a viewer?
Would you really prefer that ALL Rule 34 artists give up on popular characters and just do their own little nobodies? Who benefits from that aside from the corporations? Why do you feel the need to side with Warner Brothers, who rake in billions, over small artists who are lucky to rake in thousands off their work?
Tell that to the dozens of artists financially destroyed every year trying to do this. If anyone actually turned this hypocrite in, he'd pay all he'd made and more.
Stunning hypocrisy, really. "You can't post this unlicensed derivative work that I do not pay for usage of without paying me."
Anonymous27(10): Sohei, if anyone turned Oni in, and a license owner decided to come after him, he likely would be bankrupted, not because he did anything wrong but because he wouldn't be able to pay the legal bills necessary to prove it in court.
And again, get off your high horse, you're on RULE 34, a site DEVOTED to people "ripping off licensed characters". There's not one pic on this entire site that doesn't involve a licensed character of some type. If that bothers you, then talk to the owners of THIS site about shutting it down, not about the artists that get posted here.
You seem to draw a distinction between whether the artist asks for compensation for his work or not, but legally there is NONE. Doing a parody of a licensed work is legal, whether the artist is paid for his efforts or gives it away for free. Copyright theft is illegal, whether the artist is paid for his efforts or gives it away for free. If one is illegal, they are both illegal, and copyright holders are just as apt to go after the one as the other.
It would be YOU who is the hipocrite, for being (apparently) 100% fine with any artist willing to (in your opinion) commit copyright theft in a manner in which YOU aren't expected to pay for it, and yet be vehemently opposed to it if you are given the opportunity to help fund his efforts to continue producing work for you to enjoy.
I'm sure artists like Oni don't shed a single tear over hypocrites like you, but I would ask you again, what favorable outcome do you see here? What good do you hope to accomplish? Would you prefer that Oni stop providing work to HU? If so you'd see his output halved, and all the work he's turned in over the past few months would stop, and the dozen or so pics he's scheduled to be doing over the rest of the year just wouldn't happen. How does that benefit you? Is this really just all about schadenfreude?
craggle: actually legally there is a difference between drawing a copyrighted character for fun and doing it for profit. there are some grey muddled areas in between, but it's not all treated exactly the same.
and morally the difference is even huger.
oni is a huge hypocrite, who uses somebody else's work without paying and yet demands other people pay for his. if he's just sharing his talents freely, that's all good, because it's just for fun. if he wants to sell his own creations, that's cool too. i've also said before that there are compromises that allow him to get paid and doesn't turn him into a parasite and hypocrite.
but he hasn't chosen any of them, maybe because they'd earn him less money, but that's not our problem. being a hypocrite because it pays more still makes you a hypocrite, and because he's a hypocrite, people will freely pirate what he produces and respect him less for it. it's just a fact.
it actually is human nature to feel a desire to punish people who are behaving wrongly even if it means in the long run they get less. like that study of two people, where one person gets to decide how an award of $10 gets split between them, and the other person gets to either agree, and take what the other person offers, or disagree, and both get nothing. if the first person says "okay, here's the split, i get $9, and you get $1", it's always in the second person's interests to accept, because at least he gets something, but in most cases, people will recognize it's unfair and seek to punish the other party even when it costs themselves.
same thing here. oni's a big hypocrite, and people will punish him for it by not paying for his work and distributing it, because the greater principle is more important. people recognize both that these characters aren't his to make money off, and that if 500000 people pay for access to his pictures instead of 50, he's not doing 50000 times the amount of work. one or the other, we might be able to forgive. but when you put both together, it's a big old scent of hypocrite in the air.
you're not going to convince anybody here, because we're in the right.
here's the breakdown:
oni charges access to his work, and nobody pirates... end result: a very few people are happy, and oni gets a fair bit of money that rightly belongs to the copyright holders of the work he's pirating anyway. work is eventually lost to time, because nobody pirates and sooner or later everyone who paid will get tired of it or have HD crashes, etc.
oni charges access to his work, and piracy rampant... end result: many people are happy, and oni gets a little less money (because most people aren't going to pay for it anyway, it's a shitty price point) that still rightfully belongs to the copyright holders. work is preserved by ubiquity.
oni gives work away freely: everybody happy, except oni doesn't get the money he wants, but lots of people do art for love, not a career. oni's works survive much longer.
oni does commissions and gives them away freely afterwards, unless the commissioner requests otherwise: everybody happy, commissioner really happy, oni gets paid a fair wage for a fair job, like everybody else in the world. oni's works survive in the public mind indefinitely.
we can't stop oni from choosing to make fewer people happy so he can make a lot more money off his violating the copyrights of others. but we can act to maximize happiness by ensuring his pay works are as freely available as possible.
Anonymous28(10): No Craggle, no legal difference. There's case law on the book, they're just as free to sue over either.
Also, none of the artists that do Rule 34 work are "using other people's work," they're doing the work themselves, they're just using recognizable characters. If Oni were just scanning in comics or something and then trying to sell those it would be an entirely different story, but an artist's work is his own, even if he uses copyrighted characters in its production.
And no, people won't steal his work because "he's a hypocrite," they'll steal it because THEY are, and they're also cheap, and they will look to any excuse to get what they want without paying for it. End of story. Hypocrisy has nothing to do with it. I'm sure that even if he was using original characters the same people would be clamoring for free copies of it because "how dare he ask money for his hard work."
Just understand, if Oni goes down, Rule 34 goes down with him, because the two are on the same legal ground, shaky or not.
Also,
"
same thing here. oni's a big hypocrite, and people will punish him for it by not paying for his work and distributing it, because the greater principle is more important. people recognize both that these characters aren't his to make money off, and that if 500000 people pay for access to his pictures instead of 50, he's not doing 50000 times the amount of work. one or the other, we might be able to forgive. but when you put both together, it's a big old scent of hypocrite in the air. "
This leads me to believe that you have no idea what the word "hypocrite" means. You do understand that it doesn't just mean "people I don't like," right?
Also your scenarios are a bit flawed. The first one is about right, except that the works would last about as long as under any other method, just on less computers. The Second is closer to being true. The third doesn't work because if Oni isn't getting paid then he won't have the time to put into making the art, so it wouldn't be produced to be "given away freely", and nobody wins. The Fourth works, to a point, except that he's ALREADY doing that at the fastest rate he can afford to, and we STILL get whiners like you trying to ruin a good thing.
craggle: for the sake of this post, i'm assuming you're the same anon i've argued with at length before... it just makes it easier, but also for my own sanity, it's nice to imagine that there's not another moron out there.
so let's begin.
"This leads me to believe that you have no idea what the word "hypocrite" means. You do understand that it doesn't just mean "people I don't like," right?"
oh, sure. do you? because you used it to discuss people who were pointing out oni's hypocrisy. but hell, you've shown yourself incapable of understanding words before, so what's one more.
saying "it's unfair for you to use my work without paying for it" while simultaneously using the work of others without paying for it, is hypocrisy. unless oni paid a license fee, he's a hypocrite. pointing out he's a hypocrite, and that we won't support it is not hypocricy.
and yes, oni is absolutely using other people's work. they did work designing the characters. they did the work making them popular, they did all the work making them the kind of characters we want to see. oni does individual drawings, but that doesn't mean he's not profiting off the work of others. otherwise, he'd make exactly as much money producing his own works, copyrighted by him. oni is a trying to profit off all that work while giving nothing back. i think it's fair to call him a hypocrite for that. yes, i did some sloppy conflating with earlier arguments when i brought up the 'more money for no more work' (which i didn't successfully tie back to the whole concept of "you expect to get paid for your work, don't you?" that started the argument, because the artists aren't asking for the same treatment, they're asking for special treatment. but it doesn't matter because our reactions to hypocrisy are always tempered by other factors, some of which are not directly related to the hypocracy itself. someone who makes a billion dollars hating gays while actually being gay himself is going to be hated a lot more than someone who does the exact same thing but doesn't make any money at all, just does it to fit in with his peers, even though making money has nothing to do with hypocrisy.
and pointing out what a hypocrite he is and castigating him for it, is not itself hypocrisy. if you constantly say gays are horrid abominations while riding cock on the side, and the guy you're want laughs and says, "hey, i thought gays were horrid abominations? I'm not going to support that. get the fuck out of here." you don't get to say, "oh my god, where's that tolerance you already speak of? you've got no right to look down on me for being gay, you're a hypocrite!"
even removing all metaphors and playing on the face of it, there's nothing hypocritical about saying it's okay for someone to violate someone else's copyright for free, but it it's wrong to do it and charge money to get access. that's what you used when you tried to turn the hypocrite label back on the people who brought it up.
and you're wrong, it's not exactly the same, legally. you're probably thinking of cases where 'for profit' was interpreted much more loosely than "i got paid directly for this", which i mentioned. yes, rule34 is on shaky legal ground, but the concept of rule34 art in general is not, and if you think that companies are less likely to go after someone who produces work freely and puts it out there for people to enjoy, than someone who charges money for copies of derivative works of stuff they own, without paying the people who created it all, you're delusional or a moron... well, the latter's true. and even if they were legally exactly the same, which they aren't, but let's say they are... morally, it's still a lot better to do it for free. you disagree. we've already been over that. i've already broken my decision to not get into this with you again, so after this i'm going to try to ignore your stupidity again, but let's try one more time...
let's say there's this great field. everybody loves going out there to party, because it's a great place, lovely scenery, great view of the mountain and stars. it's somebody else's land, sure, but we're not doing it any harm. some people play music inspired by the scenery and stars, and great, we love music, and we're all friends hanging out. and if someone wants to put a can out for tips, or plaster paid ads on their instrument, or even charge money to do requests, great. we respect the people who play, they make it a greater place.
but then someone comes along and says, "okay, i'm going to play music in this field, and anyone who wants to listen has to pay me $5." and sectioning off a section of this field that's not theirs and charging admission.
at that point it's more than fair for everybody to say, "uh, dude... this isn't even your field. fuck off. you want to do that, go use your own field." they're not improving this place we all love. they're using the space to run a business. this person has turned it from a gathering of like minded people just trying to have fun into an attempt to run a business not just profiting off the people trying to have fun, but actively costing them. this is not something we respect. and if we can find a way to enjoy the music without paying, we will, because this person is acting like a tool, but tools can still make decent music.
it doesn't matter if he's playing more shows than he was before he started charging it doesn't matter if he also does free shows from time to time (not actually free shows, but paid request shows). it's not his field. we refuse to support him because he's being a tool, even if refusing to support him means less for us to enjoy. my examples were bigger than just onim even though i used his name. it's about the community. if oni can't hack it without being a tool, than it's no big loss.
Anonymous29(10): "saying "it's unfair for you to use my work without paying for it" while simultaneously using the work of others without paying for it, is hypocrisy."
There is a distinction between drawing an ORIGINAL piece of art that parodies a copyrighted character within it, and just simply taking that piece of art against the wishes of the artist involved.
"unless oni paid a license fee, he's a hypocrite. pointing out he's a hypocrite, and that we won't support it is not hypocricy. "
Complaining about someone else "stealing" and then engaging in even more -direct- theft yourself -would- be hypocrisy though. If you truly had as much respect for artists as you claim, then you would expect the original properties of the work Oni creates as much as the characters that he parodies with them.
And no, you're wrong about the "for profit" thing, the case law doesn't support your position. People have successfully defended parody works for which they received a profit, and have also unsuccessfully defended works in which they gained nothing whatsoever for their work. There is no legal distinction, nothing in the law says that something is only a copyright violation if a profit is made from it, what matters is the USE of the copyright. A Drawing if Mickey Mouse is as much Disney's right to go after whether it's sold for $1, $1 million, or distributed for free.
"
but then someone comes along and says, "okay, i'm going to play music in this field, and anyone who wants to listen has to pay me $5." and sectioning off a section of this field that's not theirs and charging admission."
Except that's not what's happening here. Oni is not in your field. Oni is in his own field, nearby, and if you want to go there and listen to his music, then there is indeed a cover fee, but some people have been bootlegging his concerts, just because he plays covers of the Beetles and Rolling Stones and whatnot, and have been playing them in your field without compensating him for his efforts in playing them in the first place. That's wrong. You don't have to go to his field, you don't have to support his work so that he can keep performing, but it is still wrong to surreptitiously gain access to his music without paying for it.
For your example to hold up, Oni would have to be sectioning off a portion of Rule 34 and preventing you access to it, which he's not doing.
craggle: my god you are a moron. you really do have trouble following simple concepts. i suppose you should be proud, i keep trying to walk away from your moronicity, but then you keep missing basic things and i get drawn back in here. once again, i'll try to back away after this, at least for a few weeks, no matter how moronic you get in response. i'm sure you'll put forth a grand effort at outdoing yourself, but i'm going to try and be strong... (though i will be posting this in multiple parts because apparently this comment contains some banned part and doesn't say what)
the first thing you miss here is we're not "complaining" about his "stealing" copyrighted characters. well, most of us aren't, anyway, maybe there are some people are, but they're morons, like you, just in a different direction.
we're pointing out he's being a fucking hypocrite by taking the work of others and then demanding people pay him for the right to see what he's done with it. that's not hypocrisy that's pointing out he's a hypocrite. and i don't respect oni for being one. and we're saying we don't believe anyone should financially support someone who demands money for access to work they built off somebody else without compensating them.
my position is totally consistent. you just don't agree with it. and every single thing i've created off the work of others (and there have been several, but i'm not going to list them), i've not charged for. most rule 34 artists are the same way, same with fan fic writers and plenty of other types of people who use other people's work for fun, but not profit. some charge for the actual work they put into a piece (commissions), but that's a different thing, and they don't charge just to for the right to view it.
you're the one who seems to be using hypocrite as 'someone i don't like'. which, by the way, kinda makes you a bit of a hypocrite since you recently accused me of that while you did the same thing. but then, you are a retard, so i'll give you a pass on that one. oni is a hypocrite. we're just pointing that out. and we won't support it.
craggle: playing songs in the field is "art with other people's owned characters". and he's using that other person's field and trying to put up walls so only people who pay him can see what he's doing with it.
craggle: so yeah, he's sectioning something off, and
the walls are the ones around in the work he's doing. if he wants to set up walls, he can do it in his own field, for stuff he creates by himself, characters he creates by himself. some people won't respect those either, but i don't defend that.
craggle: but when it's not his fucking field, we take exception to him telling us we can't use any part of it in any way we want. we feel he doesn't have a right to wall any of it off. we all use the field in a free and fun way, and we'll continue to use the field in a non-profit way, even the parts he's trying to wall off. if he wants to play in the field, we're going to listen if we can, because we believe he's got no moral right to demand we follow his rules in someone else's field.
craggle: and overall, he's being a tool. and his example, if it makes him money, only encourages other people to be tools and deprive the whole community of rule34 art, lowering the overall amount of happiness and making an artificial scarcity of something that can be enjoyed freely by everybody.
craggle: my god that was a pain in the ass, apparently something along the lines of (zatanna speak) "dehsilbatse retcarahc tra" is a banned term for some reason.
Anonymous30(10): "we're pointing out he's being a fucking hypocrite by taking the work of others and then demanding people pay him for the right to see what he's done with it. "
If you want to call him names, that's fine, but don't pretend that it justifies bad behavior on your part.
Whether you choose to support Oni or not is entirely up to you, plenty of people don't, I'm sure. The basic question is, do you enjoy his work, and would you like to see it continue? If not, then you've clearly got no reason to support him. If, however, you would like to see him continue, then -somebody's- got to give him the financial support to make that possible, even if it's not you personally. I've met a few hentai artists, and I think you can trust that he's not rolling in cash over something like this, I'd bet he makes a lot less in a month than you do.
"and every single thing i've created off the work of others (and there have been several, but i'm not going to list them), i've not charged for."
That doesn't make it better though. You're still benefiting, even if only in name recognition or personal satisfaction, off the work of others. I personally think that's fine, but I don't think it's on any higher moral ground than if you'd charged for it. The right to get paid comes from -doing the work-, if all you're doing is taking an image off the web and slapping it on a tshirt of something then you don't deserve to make much off that, but if you're creating an original piece of art, even if you use copyrighted characters, then you have every right to take a profit off that.
"oni is not in his own field, he's still in someone else's field. if he was in his own field, he'd be DRAWING HIS OWN CHARACTERS."
Now you're mixing metaphors. The field is a location, not an artistic style. The artistic style would be if he was doing cover songs, rather than writing his own, and plenty of musicians make good music as cover artists.
"and overall, he's being a tool. and his example, if it makes him money, only encourages other people to be tools and deprive the whole community of rule34 art, "
But that's the problem here, nobody is being deprived of art. That implies that under other circumstances, they would be -receiving- the art. That's not the case. Oni still provides totally free art on a weekly basis, just as he did prior to joining up with HU. He's also now doing a weekly piece for HU, which you can take or leave, but either way it would not have otherwise existed, so to argue that by working with HU Oni is somehow "depriving people of their free art" is like arguing that a musician who is only able to afford the time to perform because of the cover charges at the bar he plays in is "depriving people of free music," when without that payment he would not be playing those songs -anywhere-, and would instead be doing something else. The music just -wouldn't exist-, and I think that's a point you just don't seem to understand.
Personally, I'm fine with supporting Oni if it means we'll continue to get four awesome pics per month that we'd never otherwise see out of him.
craggle: glad you conceded that oni's a hypocrite, by the way. for that, i'll give you the benefit of one more response (in multiple parts and peppered with random .'s because apparently there's a banned element again without telling me what it is), even though most of what you say is just your usual bullshit. there is no bad behavior on my part. we've already been through this, i've no obli.gation to pay if i didn't agree in adva.nce, and sp.reading his art for n.o cost is a higher cal.ling, se.rving a greater good. maybe you don't agree, just like i don't agree that mak.ing mon.ey of.f some.body's hard work without comp.ensating them is not far worse than just having fun and enjo.ying creating art based on som.ebody's hard work, oh well, we have fundame.ntally mo.ral val.ues, but in mine, there's no bad beh.avior to be ashamed of or be excused, so i won't be.
the question for you may be "do i like the work and want to support it", but for me and others it's "is oni's beh.avior something i want to support", and the answer is no, suppor.ting it is fund.amentally bad and working against it is good.
and again, there is a dist.inction here. i've never said that he shouldn't be co.mpensated for his wo.rk because it's based on oth.ers'. what he shouldn't be co.mpensated for is sell.ing ACC.ESS to his work, especia.lly when he's just se.lling copys. if he se.lls a milli.on copies, he's doing no more wo.rk than if he sells 50, but all of that is done with cha.rs he didn't make, chars somebo.dy el.se explic.itly holds the right to make mo.ney off, and they're not getting squat for it. if he wants to charge for his w.ork, he can charge for his WORK. that's done by commissio.n, he's getting paid to do wo.rk. if he's not making enough that way, he can try chargi.ng more, or learning to w.ork faster. but ta.king mo.ney to produce (at no cos.t or effo.rt to himself) copi.es of other peo.ples shit, in addition to his own, without pay.ing the other person, is wrong, and it pretty much is just stamping a t-shirt with an offici.al drawing. in that case, the person sel.ling them is at least providing the shirt, which takes a lot of material each instance, rather than a one-time co.st in effort. and fuck, oni pa.ys more to the partners in hen.tai-united who do nothing but handle a few tech.nical details and ad.vertising, than to the people who's mat.erial he's using without any per.mision. he probably p.ays more to them than he gets himself, which if true makes him not just wrongheaded, but stupid.
craggle: with the metphor, not everthing in an ana_logy has to track to the wo_rld, when you try, you end up with no_nsense or just retell_ing the arg, instead of giving a new way to lo_ok at it.
craggle: the field is the area we al.l enjoy, shar.ers, discu.ssers, even fa.nwriters, area own.ed by others that we're all treading on a little, but we do it for love, not mone.y. if you play mus.ic, you're certainly adding creati.ve wo.rk to the environment, wor.k that is disti.nctly dif.ferent than the owners might have done with the field, and there are plenty of people there doing it, but when you do it for mon.ey and say we can't listen in your area of the field unless we p.ay, we point out it's not YOUR area at all, and you don't look like you're doing it for love instead of mon.ey. you may be doing orignal w.ork, but you've got no ri.ght to say where we go on that field and what we do there, so we'll do whatever we want with the performance you put on that field.
yes, i know that if oni doesn't get his mon.ey he won't produce as much art, but boo-fucking-hoo. he should find a better way to do it, one that doesn't suggest that the only people who should enjoy art are those that p.ay for it. because the worst situation is that more artists think the p.aywal approach is an okay way to behave, which means that there's much less art for everybody because everybody will be trying to slice off their piece of the pie and keep everybody but their own subs.cribers from enjoying it. the various art may still exist, but, without rampant shar.ing, very few will be able to have access to any of it, and for those who don't, it might as well not exist. the greater good is to discourage this philosophy in any way we can and increase the number of people made happy by what is there. if he continues to produce art, we'll continue to shar.e it free.ly, because that's the next best scenario. in all of this, there are still other ways to make mon.ey in 34-art that doesn't deprive the co.mmunity of access to the field. or, if he wants to control part of a field, get his own field. if he can't make enough doing that, then maybe he can't hack art as a career and should just do it as a hobby, and get a real j.ob like everybody else. anyway, if he's willing to reach a much smaller audience, probably a tenth of one percent of who would otherwise enjoy it, for a tiny bit more cash (still not even as much as i make in a month, apparently), instead of spreading his art to everybody who wants it for a little less of a payday, then he's not really much of an artist in my book.
Anonymous31(10): You're right that you're under no obligation to pay if you didn't agree to in advance, but you're also not justified in viewing his work without paying. I'm not saying that if you have accidentally or unknowingly viewed his HU work that you should have to pay him back, but if you knowingly see a thumbnail of one of his HU restricted works then honor would dictate that you not click on it, not view the full picture, not save it to your hard drive as one who properly paid for that right would be able to do with a clean conscience.
Also, illegally redistributing his art is not "working against his behavior," the absolute "best case scenario," form your perspective at least, is that it would lead to decreased sign-ups at HU, to the point that it would no longer be viable for him to continue there. All that would mean is that he wouldn't be producing the HU pieces that you seem so determined to "get out to the world" and would go back from producing two pieces per week to only producing one, and the contents of that one would be entirely determined by what people were willing to commission, which means no Cheetara, no Velma, no Smurfette, no Homestuck, no DC villains, no Dragon Age, etc. None of the stuff he's been able to add to the world via a support mechanism that allows him to be more flexible in the subject matter. The world would only be a lesser place for your efforts.
"if he se.lls a milli.on copies, he's doing no more wo.rk than if he sells 50,"
Yeah, but selling millions isn't likely. I think you greatly overestimate the profit margins on these sites. The reason selling access is better than selling the individual works is that it allows for more income than one individual can likely afford. It's why we have more movies that are screened in theaters for as many people as can afford a ticket than we do that are entirely paid for by a single individual for his own personal use. It's why we have more comics that are paid for by thousands of customers than we do comics that are entirely paid for out of the pockets of a single customer. There are some generous commission customers out there, I'm sure, but none so generous that they could comfortably support an artist on their own.
"yes, i know that if oni doesn't get his mon.ey he won't produce as much art, but boo-fucking-hoo. he should find a better way to do it, one that doesn't suggest that the only people who should enjoy art are those that p.ay for it."
I think he's already put out a call for suggestions on that. If you can think of a better way for him to make money off his work than HU, better than direct commissions, and something that is doable in the real world, then I'm sure he'd be happy if you shot him an email about it.
"or, if he wants to control part of a field, get his own field."
Like, maybe, his own site?
"anyway, if he's willing to reach a much smaller audience, probably a tenth of one percent of who would otherwise enjoy it, for a tiny bit more cash (still not even as much as i make in a month, apparently), instead of spreading his art to everybody who wants it for a little less of a payday, then he's not really much of an artist in my book. "
So to you, an artist is only an artist if he cares more about spreading his art as widely as possible than he does about being able to support himself? That's a pretty sad world you live in.
Anonymous32: Alright, I just read all of this and I feel I need to explain to craggle why he is wrong.
The vast majority of comic books made today are available digitally. Now, there are a few ways you can get these comics. The first is you can download the comic off a torrent or rapidshare-type site for free, which is illegal. Piracy is something comic book creators expect to happen, just as businesses expect shrinkage.
The second option is you can buy the comic on it's own from whatever sites it is available on (comixology, Marvel digital, et cetera). I'd like to note here that you can also save these comics, and thus own them in digital form. This also allows you to show it to friends (if they are physically near your computer/smartphone/tablet/whatever), but you cannot legally send the file to them.
The third option is that you can subscribe for what is usually a cheaper price than buying each individual issue, and you will receive them as they come out. This is most comparable to paysites and there are also packages that let you subscribe to several different similar comics in one fee (like, say, every Spider-Man spin-off being produced) or even the entire library that the site has (Marvel Unlimited).
The fourth option is actually buying a physical issue of the comic, which you can then do with as you please. This has been being done for thousands of years and isn't really relevant to the conversation, so let's not go into it.
What you are arguing is that, because they have already made the work and have no real hand in it's distribution, comic book creators should give you all their work for free. And the thing is, they sort of do, because they know it's all gonna get thrown out into the open anyway. The same goes for Oni's stuff.
When you buy or subscribe to a comic, you are in many ways just tipping the creators for their work, and supporting them at the same time. The comic Freakangels was released weekly on the web because Warren Ellis was well aware of this and knew that people who like comics know how to get them for free, but will pay for the ones that they enjoy. Every trade of Freakangels was financially successful.
You are completely free to go places other than Hentai United and view the uncensored pictures that Oni has worked on. This is, however, piracy. Oni knows that people will do this, and likely does not care that they do. What he does care about is getting paid for his work and receiving a steady income, which Hentai United provides. They are also aware that everything will get leaked on to the web, but just as aware that admirers will gladly pay a fee to continually and legally see what he puts out. These people do it because they like his work, or they're just really horny and have money to burn.
My point is, Oni is essentially just working as a digital comics artist, and while on a smaller scale, he is also making less money. Hentai United are acting as his publisher. The only downside is that there is no option to pay less to just get Oni's work, but that is not his fault. And honestly, you could legitimately argue that HU should have an option for that, just as I could argue it wouldn't be financially feasible for them. But that steps away from the comics industry and more into the porn industry, so let's not.
soheifox: Except you didn't address the part where Oni is using characters that are not his and trying to make money off them. The point is that Oni is a hypocrite for demanding money while not paying it up the chain. He is a pirate begging others not to pirate his piracy.
soheifox: Anon 35: Keep up. The "parody" defense never works when tried. It only work when the "common person" can see it as parody. Mad Magazine engages in parody, and would call their Blundercats character "Retarda". Oni engaged in piracy, and calls his Thundercats ripoff Cheetara.
Anonymous38(32): The average person can see it as parody because the average person knows that there will never be a situation on Thundercats where Cheetara takes off all her clothes and poses nude, or has sex with Lion-O. You could argue this point about some other subject matter, but certainly not Thundercats.
Just to cover my bases, though, let's ignore parody and just call it fan-art. Fan-art is fan-art and exists everywhere. Fan-art is sold all around the world in many forms, and Oni is not even really asking you to buy fan-art. He is asking you to pay him to draw a picture, or pay him to have access to the pictures he draws. What he actually draws in those pictures is irrelevant. It's also worth noting that pretty much every artist in the goddamn world does commissions, both on characters they own and characters they do not.
And really, no matter how much you claim it's piracy, the creators don't care and the law doesn't care. Why should you?
Anonymous39: If someone narced him out the creators would care. Cartoon Network smashes folks selling porn of their characters almost as brutally as Disney. The law cares also; that's why Disney has such success smashing them.
I'm not going to narc him out, but he's still a big fucking hypocrite. He's a pirate begging others not to pirate his work. i'm not sure why paheal even cares that artists want to be DNP.
No person has ever sucessfully forced anyone, using the law, to take down their porn of other people's copyrighted pictures. That useless hack Zimmerman tried it a few years back and his ass is still raw from it. He hasn't done a "for profit" picture of copyrighted characters for a very long time because his attempt to make others stop pirating his piracy simply drew attention from the real owners of those likenesses.
Anonymous40(32): Again, if the law cared about commissions, every comic book artist in the industry would get sued. He's not pirating anything because he's not selling anything copyrighted. He's selling commissions and/or access to a site where he puts up art. The contents of said art is irrelevant. If I'm wrong, show me the case study to prove it. Otherwise it's pure conjecture.
That being said, I'm not saying he has the right to have his work taken down from sites like these. Them doing so is just respecting the work of the artists. And just because Oni censors his work doesn't mean he's whining about people pirating it. It's called a teaser.
Anonymous46: Hey, just wondering... isn't the rule of this this site that images have to contain sex or nudity unless there is little to no content of the subject? In this case, Cheetara may be nude but she's all censored out in a way that could nudity could be shown on prime time television. There's definitely no sex going on, so this is little more than Oni using Rule 34 as advertising for his "for pay" content elsewhere.
Fuck that, and fuck Oni. If he wants to charge for his work, that's fine... but it seems pretty shitty to me to take advantage of a free site to tease people into viewing his work elsewhere that you'll have to pay for. Saying that people complaining about this image is just them being cheap and acting entitled is one thing, but if Oni wants to charge for his work, then he should have to pay to advertise it. And if he's going to be cheap, then anyone else is entitled to be cheap by complaining about his business model.
Still waiting for that Dejah Thoris pic of his...
Hey guys, I know we're in a terrible economy right now, but spend money on porn anyway!
- Reply
When your parents stop paying your bills for you then you can complain about people wanting free stuff.
I'M ON YOUR SIDE FOOL.
http://tgfb.net/hentai/res/1.html#1
They slammed ReiQ's ass with it.
http://tgfb*net/hentai/res/1*html#1
(replace * with . )
They slammed ReiQ's ass with it.
- Reply
And Anon6, these pics take hours of work to produce, you should be extremely grateful of any artist that produces any art that they allow you to see for free. Would you be willing to do your job for several hours and not get paid for it?
And Anon7/8, Just a clarification, an artist retains 100% full copyright of the work THEY produce, whether or not it features a parody of a character that is owned by someone else.
false analogy. more like "would you be willing to do your job for several hours and not get paid for it directly by every single person who ever gets pleasure from it?"
for almost everybody else in the world, the answer is yes, you would. you get paid by one person/company, who commissions you to do the work, even though many others may benefit.
so, the proper and moral compensation plan for artists is commission, selling prints advertising, or asking for tips. not holding their art hostage and saying "yeah it's there, but even though it doesn't cost me any more time or effort now that it's done whether you see it or not, you don't get to see it unless you pay me"
Now, as for the rest of your argument, poppycock. Yes, commissions and such are ONE way of earning money on a piece, but this is another, equally valid one. It's more like a comic book or a song or a movie, you do the work on spec, and the idea is that people later pay to enjoy it. If people don't end up paying to enjoy it, then you've clearly wasted your time in bothering and aren't likely to do it again.
The benefit from the consumer's perspective is that you get more bang for your buck. Instead of paying $70+ to get a single image, you're paying less than half that to get access to dozens of images from Oni, as well as hundreds from the other artists on the site. The costs of producing the work get spread out over multiple customers, as if 3-4 of them chipped in to have a single piece produced, so it ends up being cheaper for each of them while returning the same rewards.
Now, if a pic is on HU, it's there because nobody commissioned it (he doesn't post any commissions to HU). If anyone does want to commission a pic of Cheetara from Oni, I'm sure he'd do it, and with their permission make it free for everyone to see, as he does with his Monday pics, but since nobody has, this is the only way that this pic would come into being. Without the prospect of earning back the time investment, I'm sure he'd rather be playing a videogame or something. He wasn't just cranking out all this art and then suddenly decided to start charging people to view it.
that's how it works for most of the world. you get paid to do your job. i was responding to the ridiculous argument that the HU shit is fair because "you expect to be paid for your work, don't you?". except what they're demanding is that they produce one batch of fries and everybody who has it has to pay full price.
that's just dumb. and the bang for the buck on paysites is shit compared to most media (where, when you pay, you usually get a physical object. i think paying for digital files is shit, too). it's a better deal than commissions, yes, but in commissions you're paying a premium for control. an artist could also make money by demanding that he reach a certain number in tips before he makes a new piece. that's fair. but again, i don't like it when artists hold their art hostage. then they become just commercial saleswhores.
so, yeah, i still say it's a shitty way for an artist to make money. now, i want them to make money. but i want them to do it in a way that's good for everybody.
now, i do have an exception to the "it's a shitty way for artists to operate" policy, and that's if they have exclusivity be a temporary thing, or has extra perks like a ultra-high-quality-size. you want to see it right away, or in high-def, it's pay, but after 6 months everybody can see an average-size picture. that's a fair way to do it.
And yes, the artist isn't doing more work if he gets hundredws of thousands of people to view the image, but let's be fair, he probably isn't getting hundreds of thousands of sign-ups out of this. It's probably more like a half-dozen per piece he puts out.
But ok, let's leave the fry cook out of this, how about someone who writes a book? They write a book and put it on the market. Each person that buys a copy of that book adds to the royalty that the writer receives for doing it, directly. Do writers not deserve royalties? Should they just get a flat fee to write the book, whether they sell ten or ten thousand copies?
As for paying for digital, that's your choice to make. Nobody is forcing you to buy any product you don't want, and if you don't feel HU is worth your money then don't sign up. And better an artist become a "commercial salewhore" than broke.
Now, ok, you say that you want the artist to make money, but in a way that's good for everybody. Fine. How then? Assuming that commissions alone can't cut it, because the amount that the artist would have to charge to make a living off of commissions would be well above what most people could afford to pay, what would you suggest as a "fair" way for the artist to make money off his art?
The "high-def" or "six month delay" things might sound nice, but it would probably result in far less interest in the site, as most customers would have no problem with a smaller image (I shrink most large images down anyways), and a delay wouldn't be a huge deal if you were guaranteed to get it for free later. That just wouldn't work.
again, by comparing art with art you're missing the fucking point. this argument started because somebody said "how would you like it if you did your job and nobody paid you", but that's not what artists are doing. they demand to be treated differently from everybody else. they say "i did this work, now everyone who enjoys it has to pay me individually the same amount in order to benefit from it"
and let's not pretend that what Oni does is just like the movie people or book people do are the same, anyway. one of the reasons people rail against pay sites is that the value for money is shit. i can pay $3 and get a book full of images the same quality as oni's, and i actually get a book i get to keep. meanwhile, most paysites, they charge you a monthly fee of $20 or something and you get, maybe, a handful of images a month. sometimes, you don't get anything at all. if an artist doesn't want to, they can just not do anything new for months on end and people will continue to pay. oni, i'll grant you, is doing pretty good by his subscribers so far (the value for money is still shit, but it's less shit than a lot of other such sites), but at any time he could descide to slack off.
that's shit. in other media, the done-on-spec, get-paid-afterwards model work because the cost of buying a copy is tiny compared to the cost to produce it.
if i want somebody to make a movie to my specifications, i have to lay out, at least, $100,000 probably (and many millions if it's anything i'd actually want to see). but if i want to buy any old movie, i pay maybe $10. less than 1%. now, if i want an artist to draw what i want, let's say $70. but if i want to access any old picture they have, they insist i have to pay $20, a little less than a third. fuck that. the value for money is shit. and i can't buy just one picture, i have to buy access to whatever he decides he wants to put out. that's like saying if i want to buy start wars, i have to pay $20 million dollars a month to get access to everything george lucas ever made.
if an artist can't make money enough money off commissions, advertising, or tip jars, the market's spoken.
but i don't respect the paysite model at all. it's holding your art hostage until everybody who wants to see it pays. you give out teases of "hey, you like this? it already exists. you want to see it? well, then you pay, even though you're not getting anything tangible, even though i'm not doing any more work, and even though (in this case) these aren't even my own characters." i don't respect that, and an artist who does it doesn't respect me. and so i won't abide by any restrictions, i won't pay their stupid fee, i'll pirate the art freely and share it freely, because if the artist had integrity, they'd do the same, and anything that helps the bullshit 'pay monthly to access' business model fail is a good in and of itself. if an artist behaves in a way i think is fair, i'll be fair back.
As for the quality for the money thing, it's all relative, it's all what the product is worth to you. If the site is not worth it to you, then you don't have to sign up, just as if a 2-hour movie isn't worth $10 then you don't have to go to the theater and if 10-minute comic isn't worth it to you you don't have to pay $3 for the comic. That doesn't mean that you should complain to the theater for not letting you in for free, it just means that you shouldn't watch the movie you don't feel is worth the investment.
As to HU specifically, Oni's committed to at least one new exclusive image per week, which he posts promos of so you know what you'll be getting, and also the occasional alternate version. You also get to see the artwork from the other artists, which amounts to a dozen or so other pics per week, give or take.
And of course if the artists slack off, you don't have to keep paying.
I also don't think Oni would ever charge $20 for ONE old pic, the monthly fee gives you access to every pic he's done for the site (21 so far), and every pic the other artists have done too (hundreds in total). Yes, it's a bundle thing, but that's just for convenience. I'm sure if you emailed him he'd be willing to let just ONE pic go for considerably less than $20.
"hey, you like this? it already exists. you want to see it? well, then you pay, "
Again, HU is far from the first to do this. That would probably be the nickelodeon theaters at the turn of the century or something. What do you think a commercial/trailer for a movie or an HBO program is? They already made the movie, they give you a taste of it so that you'll be interested enough to pay for the full thing, and then they expect anyone interested to pay to go see it. If nobody was willing to pay to go see movies, then there would be no movie industry. The best we'd get is the occasional personal project that would suck.
"if an artist behaves in a way i think is fair, i'll be fair back. "
No, you won't, you're just coming up with bullshit reasons to be cheap. Don't try to tart it up like you have principles.
i won't get too into other forms of media, but again, most of the time, you're either paying for a performance occuring at a specific place/time (a movie theatre) with limited capacity, or you're paying for a physical object, and in most cases, if you're willing to wait a while, they'll give it to you free or practically so later (ad-supported, but that's fair). all of which puts them in a different category from what erotic artists try to do. when they're not put in a different category, like for digital copies of shit that doesn't cost anything to produce and you get nothing physical in return, i have the exact same opinion, it's a bullshit way to make money that i will not support. if something costs nothing to copy or display, i will not pay money for it unless i truly think it's worth it to reward the author themselves, through a tip. and if they DEMAND money for it, then i'm even less likely to. and if they demand money for it at a stupidly high rate compared to what it costs to have a fresh piece produced to order, then i'm even less likely to (i might still commission, because that's a fair way to make a buck). i don't care if it cost money or effort to produce, that's not my problem. find a better way to make the money.
that's my opinion anyway, and i think the opinion of many others. you don't agree, good for fucking you, but i don't feel the need to discuss it any more.
i owe nothing for something which costs nothing to reproduce and that i didn't agree to pay for in advance. even if it costs something to produce, i owe nothing if i didn't agree, not even to remove it or not look at it. if a man painted my house without permission, he couldn't demand i pay him $100 for his time and effort. he couldn't even demand i repaint the house, or not look at it, because otherwise i'd be enjoying his work without payment. we never made an agreement, i have no obligation to him. if he painted my neighbor's house, and i liked that color, and decided to copy the color on my own house, he has no right to tell me that i have to pay him too because i'm enjoying the same color house as my neighbor, because it cost him nothing to produce that color.
if an artist wanted to say "give me $50 or i won't draw this", that's fair. if he wanted to say "every time i reach $100 in tips, i'll make a new piece", that's fair. in those cases, he's demanding money in exchange for work, the basis of any economy. but once it exists, he'd better be offering something beyond the right to view it if he's going to charge money. sell a signed printed version of it shipped in the mail. sell a sketchbook.
and there are always other options for artists to make money. they might just not make as much. but boo-hoo. i don't make as much as i'd like for my job, either. i'd love more. but i'm not going to do something shitty and unethical like charge extra money for nothing to make up for it, like artists who go pay-monthly do. find a more honorable way to make more money from your art. if you can't, you're either not smart enough, just not as good an artist as you think you are and you were already making the amount of money you deserve through commissions.
"i owe nothing for something which costs nothing to reproduce and that i didn't agree to pay for in advance. "
Each reproduction costs nothing, but the original piece of art cost time and effort to produce. That cost is meant to be divided evenly amongst those that view it. By viewing it, you're defacto agreeing that you owe him for the privilege, even if you don't then honor that obligation.
As for your house painter example, that's far more irrelevant than any I've used. Oni did not "paint your house without permission." He clearly set up the terms of this situation, "you sign up with HU, you get to view the image." YOU were the one that chose to circumvent that rule. To borrow your painter analogy, it would not be the painter painting your house without permission, it would be you hiring the painter to come over and paint your house, and then refusing the agreed upon price when he'd finished.
As for your "every time i reach $100 in tips, i'll make a new piece" stance, that's just being factitious. That's no different than what he's doing now, except that he's doing the work on spec. It's "I'm doing the piece, make it have been worth it and I'll make another, and so on." The only difference is that your version would allow you to continue freeloading because it would not require that you ever pay into it.
That's what it all boils down to, end of the day. You're too cheap to contribute, and will latch on to any justification to allow you to continue to benefit without having to be a part of supporting the work you're enjoying.
i reject that principle, and substitute my own.
my principle is "if you can give many people pleasure by doing no extra work or giving up nothing tangible, to demand money from all the people who might enjoy, or to do anything to impede others from doing it is immoral." there are subtleties i won't get into, a couple things which aren't tangible which might apply, but that's it at its most basic level. i'm even willing to be generous and include "the effort of uploading it somewhere" as work (so you could make a valid business model where you draw the piece and demand a certain amount of money before it gets released).
yes, corporations do it all the time, but i don't expect morality from corporations.
that is the difference between saying "i'll do the work if i reach a certain amount of money", and saying "the work's already done, but if you want to enjoy it, pay up."
as to your assertion that we made a defacto agreement, fuck that. de facto agreements are shit, because i did not agree. okay, by reading this artistically designed post we've now made a de facto agreement that you will give me all your money for the rest of your life. i suppose since you believe you should honor de facto agreements, you should honor this one. please get to work though, because i want more of your money.
by the way, that agreement goes for everyone who reads the post, not just you, even though it was designed for you.
that's what you're saying oni or other artists are doing, after all.
and again, you make a stupid, retarded assertion that makes no sense. i'm referring to your one about "the person that does the work has the right to decide how and when the efforts of the work is used." if i created a recipe and sold it in a book, i have no right to decide that you can't make it if you live in europe, because i don't like smelly europeans. or that you can't make it on thursdays. if i make a cartoon, i have no right to say you can't draw the characters into porn, and if you or oni truly believed it, they'd have a lot less to draw and make no money at all (why aren't they too 'cheap' to produce their own characters in your view?). and if i paint your house a pretty color, i have no right to say that nobody else is allowed to look at the efforts of my work without paying. fuck, if i paint MY house a pretty color, i still have no right to say that.
what it boils down to at the end of the day is you're defending somebody who is immoral for the sake of money. oh, and you're retarded, because you assume everyone is like you and everything is about money. and also because you've come up with a position you can't logically defend, you just keep making stupid arguments that do not apply and are easily demolished.
no, this not about being cheap. it's about a principle i believe in. i do contribute to things i believe in, when they don't behave immorally, and i think they're worth it. and i'll be completely honest... with oni, i like his work, but i probably wouldn't contribute to him directly either, it doesn't reach that threshold. kind of like how with some movies i'd enjoy watching them on tv, but not buy the movie. that's not the case with everybody, though. and there are times when i find i have to contribute to people/causes that do behave immorally to get something i want. but when i don't have to, i won't. and that's why i don't pay and will freely pirate anything that is produced on a basis of immorality. it's not about being cheap, it's about having a different philosophy than you. you're free to continue to hold your view, i won't respect it, but i'll respect your right to have it.
since you've proven yourself incapable of understanding simple logic by making faulty comparisons and stupid assertions again and again, i will no longer be replying to you (at least anything longer than a sentence). unless, of course, you decided to put your money where your mouth is and honor our de facto agreement. then we might still have some talking to do.
You don't seem to understand the point of the art being produced here. This is not art that is going to get produced either way, and he's greedily asking for money on top of that. This is art that is ONLY being produced on the expectation that it will eventually get paid for, much like doing a commission without requiring payment up front (or ordering food at a place that doesn't give you the bill until after you've eaten).
If it makes you feel any better about it, don't think if it as being asked to pay for the existing pic, think of it as being asked to pay for the next pic down the line, or the one after that, or the dozens that he will hopefully be producing over the next year, because you have to understand that if it stops making money then the work would stop flowing.
Unless of course your justifications are bullshit and you're just trying to make an excuse for not paying at all, in which case, carry on.
Your "defacto agreement" argument is crap too. There is no "entrapment" in this, the pictures are put behind a pay wall, if you breach that pay wall to get to them, you know what you're engaged in. It's like if someone steals someone's TV, and then sells it on a street corner. Maybe you didn't steal that TV yourself, but you would still be buying stolen property, and that's a crime too.
Your whole "immoral" argument is even more preposterous. You haven't made the case for that at all, and just saying it repeatedly doesn't make it true.
If people insist on using the fast food analogy, that's like putting up a fast food stand with McDonalds emblazoned on the site, but not actually pay anything to the franchise.
In both cases you're relying on the existing customer base, the advertising and support they've built up over the years, to sell your knockoffs.
Fuck that shit.
Legally, it doesn't matter even a little bit whether the artist charges money for it or not. If the porn parodies on HU are illegal, then EVERYTHING on Rule 34 is EXACTLY as illegal, and pretty much everything here would need to be taken down.
In any case, it's not up for anyone here to judge the legality of it or not, until such time as a judge officially rules on whether a given work is parody or not, there is a presumption of innocence.
As to the argument that artists don't deserve to profit by using copyrighted characters, that's just childish bull-pucky. The art these guys produce is original work, whether it used copyrighted characters or not. Sure, they could put the same effort towards a character nobody's ever heard of, but the results wouldn't be nearly as fun for anyone. Would you really prefer that Oni go from drawing characters like Cheetara to drawing a "nobody" character in the same pose? Would you really enjoy that more as a viewer?
Would you really prefer that ALL Rule 34 artists give up on popular characters and just do their own little nobodies? Who benefits from that aside from the corporations? Why do you feel the need to side with Warner Brothers, who rake in billions, over small artists who are lucky to rake in thousands off their work?
- Reply
Tell that to the dozens of artists financially destroyed every year trying to do this. If anyone actually turned this hypocrite in, he'd pay all he'd made and more.
Stunning hypocrisy, really. "You can't post this unlicensed derivative work that I do not pay for usage of without paying me."
And again, get off your high horse, you're on RULE 34, a site DEVOTED to people "ripping off licensed characters". There's not one pic on this entire site that doesn't involve a licensed character of some type. If that bothers you, then talk to the owners of THIS site about shutting it down, not about the artists that get posted here.
You seem to draw a distinction between whether the artist asks for compensation for his work or not, but legally there is NONE. Doing a parody of a licensed work is legal, whether the artist is paid for his efforts or gives it away for free. Copyright theft is illegal, whether the artist is paid for his efforts or gives it away for free. If one is illegal, they are both illegal, and copyright holders are just as apt to go after the one as the other.
It would be YOU who is the hipocrite, for being (apparently) 100% fine with any artist willing to (in your opinion) commit copyright theft in a manner in which YOU aren't expected to pay for it, and yet be vehemently opposed to it if you are given the opportunity to help fund his efforts to continue producing work for you to enjoy.
I'm sure artists like Oni don't shed a single tear over hypocrites like you, but I would ask you again, what favorable outcome do you see here? What good do you hope to accomplish? Would you prefer that Oni stop providing work to HU? If so you'd see his output halved, and all the work he's turned in over the past few months would stop, and the dozen or so pics he's scheduled to be doing over the rest of the year just wouldn't happen. How does that benefit you? Is this really just all about schadenfreude?
and morally the difference is even huger.
oni is a huge hypocrite, who uses somebody else's work without paying and yet demands other people pay for his. if he's just sharing his talents freely, that's all good, because it's just for fun. if he wants to sell his own creations, that's cool too. i've also said before that there are compromises that allow him to get paid and doesn't turn him into a parasite and hypocrite.
but he hasn't chosen any of them, maybe because they'd earn him less money, but that's not our problem. being a hypocrite because it pays more still makes you a hypocrite, and because he's a hypocrite, people will freely pirate what he produces and respect him less for it. it's just a fact.
it actually is human nature to feel a desire to punish people who are behaving wrongly even if it means in the long run they get less. like that study of two people, where one person gets to decide how an award of $10 gets split between them, and the other person gets to either agree, and take what the other person offers, or disagree, and both get nothing. if the first person says "okay, here's the split, i get $9, and you get $1", it's always in the second person's interests to accept, because at least he gets something, but in most cases, people will recognize it's unfair and seek to punish the other party even when it costs themselves.
same thing here. oni's a big hypocrite, and people will punish him for it by not paying for his work and distributing it, because the greater principle is more important. people recognize both that these characters aren't his to make money off, and that if 500000 people pay for access to his pictures instead of 50, he's not doing 50000 times the amount of work. one or the other, we might be able to forgive. but when you put both together, it's a big old scent of hypocrite in the air.
you're not going to convince anybody here, because we're in the right.
here's the breakdown:
oni charges access to his work, and nobody pirates... end result: a very few people are happy, and oni gets a fair bit of money that rightly belongs to the copyright holders of the work he's pirating anyway. work is eventually lost to time, because nobody pirates and sooner or later everyone who paid will get tired of it or have HD crashes, etc.
oni charges access to his work, and piracy rampant... end result: many people are happy, and oni gets a little less money (because most people aren't going to pay for it anyway, it's a shitty price point) that still rightfully belongs to the copyright holders. work is preserved by ubiquity.
oni gives work away freely: everybody happy, except oni doesn't get the money he wants, but lots of people do art for love, not a career. oni's works survive much longer.
oni does commissions and gives them away freely afterwards, unless the commissioner requests otherwise: everybody happy, commissioner really happy, oni gets paid a fair wage for a fair job, like everybody else in the world. oni's works survive in the public mind indefinitely.
we can't stop oni from choosing to make fewer people happy so he can make a lot more money off his violating the copyrights of others. but we can act to maximize happiness by ensuring his pay works are as freely available as possible.
Also, none of the artists that do Rule 34 work are "using other people's work," they're doing the work themselves, they're just using recognizable characters. If Oni were just scanning in comics or something and then trying to sell those it would be an entirely different story, but an artist's work is his own, even if he uses copyrighted characters in its production.
And no, people won't steal his work because "he's a hypocrite," they'll steal it because THEY are, and they're also cheap, and they will look to any excuse to get what they want without paying for it. End of story. Hypocrisy has nothing to do with it. I'm sure that even if he was using original characters the same people would be clamoring for free copies of it because "how dare he ask money for his hard work."
Just understand, if Oni goes down, Rule 34 goes down with him, because the two are on the same legal ground, shaky or not.
Also,
"
same thing here. oni's a big hypocrite, and people will punish him for it by not paying for his work and distributing it, because the greater principle is more important. people recognize both that these characters aren't his to make money off, and that if 500000 people pay for access to his pictures instead of 50, he's not doing 50000 times the amount of work. one or the other, we might be able to forgive. but when you put both together, it's a big old scent of hypocrite in the air. "
This leads me to believe that you have no idea what the word "hypocrite" means. You do understand that it doesn't just mean "people I don't like," right?
Also your scenarios are a bit flawed. The first one is about right, except that the works would last about as long as under any other method, just on less computers. The Second is closer to being true. The third doesn't work because if Oni isn't getting paid then he won't have the time to put into making the art, so it wouldn't be produced to be "given away freely", and nobody wins. The Fourth works, to a point, except that he's ALREADY doing that at the fastest rate he can afford to, and we STILL get whiners like you trying to ruin a good thing.
so let's begin.
"This leads me to believe that you have no idea what the word "hypocrite" means. You do understand that it doesn't just mean "people I don't like," right?"
oh, sure. do you? because you used it to discuss people who were pointing out oni's hypocrisy. but hell, you've shown yourself incapable of understanding words before, so what's one more.
saying "it's unfair for you to use my work without paying for it" while simultaneously using the work of others without paying for it, is hypocrisy. unless oni paid a license fee, he's a hypocrite. pointing out he's a hypocrite, and that we won't support it is not hypocricy.
and yes, oni is absolutely using other people's work. they did work designing the characters. they did the work making them popular, they did all the work making them the kind of characters we want to see. oni does individual drawings, but that doesn't mean he's not profiting off the work of others. otherwise, he'd make exactly as much money producing his own works, copyrighted by him. oni is a trying to profit off all that work while giving nothing back. i think it's fair to call him a hypocrite for that. yes, i did some sloppy conflating with earlier arguments when i brought up the 'more money for no more work' (which i didn't successfully tie back to the whole concept of "you expect to get paid for your work, don't you?" that started the argument, because the artists aren't asking for the same treatment, they're asking for special treatment. but it doesn't matter because our reactions to hypocrisy are always tempered by other factors, some of which are not directly related to the hypocracy itself. someone who makes a billion dollars hating gays while actually being gay himself is going to be hated a lot more than someone who does the exact same thing but doesn't make any money at all, just does it to fit in with his peers, even though making money has nothing to do with hypocrisy.
and pointing out what a hypocrite he is and castigating him for it, is not itself hypocrisy. if you constantly say gays are horrid abominations while riding cock on the side, and the guy you're want laughs and says, "hey, i thought gays were horrid abominations? I'm not going to support that. get the fuck out of here." you don't get to say, "oh my god, where's that tolerance you already speak of? you've got no right to look down on me for being gay, you're a hypocrite!"
even removing all metaphors and playing on the face of it, there's nothing hypocritical about saying it's okay for someone to violate someone else's copyright for free, but it it's wrong to do it and charge money to get access. that's what you used when you tried to turn the hypocrite label back on the people who brought it up.
and you're wrong, it's not exactly the same, legally. you're probably thinking of cases where 'for profit' was interpreted much more loosely than "i got paid directly for this", which i mentioned. yes, rule34 is on shaky legal ground, but the concept of rule34 art in general is not, and if you think that companies are less likely to go after someone who produces work freely and puts it out there for people to enjoy, than someone who charges money for copies of derivative works of stuff they own, without paying the people who created it all, you're delusional or a moron... well, the latter's true. and even if they were legally exactly the same, which they aren't, but let's say they are... morally, it's still a lot better to do it for free. you disagree. we've already been over that. i've already broken my decision to not get into this with you again, so after this i'm going to try to ignore your stupidity again, but let's try one more time...
let's say there's this great field. everybody loves going out there to party, because it's a great place, lovely scenery, great view of the mountain and stars. it's somebody else's land, sure, but we're not doing it any harm. some people play music inspired by the scenery and stars, and great, we love music, and we're all friends hanging out. and if someone wants to put a can out for tips, or plaster paid ads on their instrument, or even charge money to do requests, great. we respect the people who play, they make it a greater place.
but then someone comes along and says, "okay, i'm going to play music in this field, and anyone who wants to listen has to pay me $5." and sectioning off a section of this field that's not theirs and charging admission.
at that point it's more than fair for everybody to say, "uh, dude... this isn't even your field. fuck off. you want to do that, go use your own field." they're not improving this place we all love. they're using the space to run a business. this person has turned it from a gathering of like minded people just trying to have fun into an attempt to run a business not just profiting off the people trying to have fun, but actively costing them. this is not something we respect. and if we can find a way to enjoy the music without paying, we will, because this person is acting like a tool, but tools can still make decent music.
it doesn't matter if he's playing more shows than he was before he started charging it doesn't matter if he also does free shows from time to time (not actually free shows, but paid request shows). it's not his field. we refuse to support him because he's being a tool, even if refusing to support him means less for us to enjoy. my examples were bigger than just onim even though i used his name. it's about the community. if oni can't hack it without being a tool, than it's no big loss.
There is a distinction between drawing an ORIGINAL piece of art that parodies a copyrighted character within it, and just simply taking that piece of art against the wishes of the artist involved.
"unless oni paid a license fee, he's a hypocrite. pointing out he's a hypocrite, and that we won't support it is not hypocricy. "
Complaining about someone else "stealing" and then engaging in even more -direct- theft yourself -would- be hypocrisy though. If you truly had as much respect for artists as you claim, then you would expect the original properties of the work Oni creates as much as the characters that he parodies with them.
And no, you're wrong about the "for profit" thing, the case law doesn't support your position. People have successfully defended parody works for which they received a profit, and have also unsuccessfully defended works in which they gained nothing whatsoever for their work. There is no legal distinction, nothing in the law says that something is only a copyright violation if a profit is made from it, what matters is the USE of the copyright. A Drawing if Mickey Mouse is as much Disney's right to go after whether it's sold for $1, $1 million, or distributed for free.
"
but then someone comes along and says, "okay, i'm going to play music in this field, and anyone who wants to listen has to pay me $5." and sectioning off a section of this field that's not theirs and charging admission."
Except that's not what's happening here. Oni is not in your field. Oni is in his own field, nearby, and if you want to go there and listen to his music, then there is indeed a cover fee, but some people have been bootlegging his concerts, just because he plays covers of the Beetles and Rolling Stones and whatnot, and have been playing them in your field without compensating him for his efforts in playing them in the first place. That's wrong. You don't have to go to his field, you don't have to support his work so that he can keep performing, but it is still wrong to surreptitiously gain access to his music without paying for it.
For your example to hold up, Oni would have to be sectioning off a portion of Rule 34 and preventing you access to it, which he's not doing.
the first thing you miss here is we're not "complaining" about his "stealing" copyrighted characters. well, most of us aren't, anyway, maybe there are some people are, but they're morons, like you, just in a different direction.
we're pointing out he's being a fucking hypocrite by taking the work of others and then demanding people pay him for the right to see what he's done with it. that's not hypocrisy that's pointing out he's a hypocrite. and i don't respect oni for being one. and we're saying we don't believe anyone should financially support someone who demands money for access to work they built off somebody else without compensating them.
my position is totally consistent. you just don't agree with it. and every single thing i've created off the work of others (and there have been several, but i'm not going to list them), i've not charged for. most rule 34 artists are the same way, same with fan fic writers and plenty of other types of people who use other people's work for fun, but not profit. some charge for the actual work they put into a piece (commissions), but that's a different thing, and they don't charge just to for the right to view it.
you're the one who seems to be using hypocrite as 'someone i don't like'. which, by the way, kinda makes you a bit of a hypocrite since you recently accused me of that while you did the same thing. but then, you are a retard, so i'll give you a pass on that one. oni is a hypocrite. we're just pointing that out. and we won't support it.
the walls are the ones around in the work he's doing. if he wants to set up walls, he can do it in his own field, for stuff he creates by himself, characters he creates by himself. some people won't respect those either, but i don't defend that.
If you want to call him names, that's fine, but don't pretend that it justifies bad behavior on your part.
Whether you choose to support Oni or not is entirely up to you, plenty of people don't, I'm sure. The basic question is, do you enjoy his work, and would you like to see it continue? If not, then you've clearly got no reason to support him. If, however, you would like to see him continue, then -somebody's- got to give him the financial support to make that possible, even if it's not you personally. I've met a few hentai artists, and I think you can trust that he's not rolling in cash over something like this, I'd bet he makes a lot less in a month than you do.
"and every single thing i've created off the work of others (and there have been several, but i'm not going to list them), i've not charged for."
That doesn't make it better though. You're still benefiting, even if only in name recognition or personal satisfaction, off the work of others. I personally think that's fine, but I don't think it's on any higher moral ground than if you'd charged for it. The right to get paid comes from -doing the work-, if all you're doing is taking an image off the web and slapping it on a tshirt of something then you don't deserve to make much off that, but if you're creating an original piece of art, even if you use copyrighted characters, then you have every right to take a profit off that.
"oni is not in his own field, he's still in someone else's field. if he was in his own field, he'd be DRAWING HIS OWN CHARACTERS."
Now you're mixing metaphors. The field is a location, not an artistic style. The artistic style would be if he was doing cover songs, rather than writing his own, and plenty of musicians make good music as cover artists.
"and overall, he's being a tool. and his example, if it makes him money, only encourages other people to be tools and deprive the whole community of rule34 art, "
But that's the problem here, nobody is being deprived of art. That implies that under other circumstances, they would be -receiving- the art. That's not the case. Oni still provides totally free art on a weekly basis, just as he did prior to joining up with HU. He's also now doing a weekly piece for HU, which you can take or leave, but either way it would not have otherwise existed, so to argue that by working with HU Oni is somehow "depriving people of their free art" is like arguing that a musician who is only able to afford the time to perform because of the cover charges at the bar he plays in is "depriving people of free music," when without that payment he would not be playing those songs -anywhere-, and would instead be doing something else. The music just -wouldn't exist-, and I think that's a point you just don't seem to understand.
Personally, I'm fine with supporting Oni if it means we'll continue to get four awesome pics per month that we'd never otherwise see out of him.
the question for you may be "do i like the work and want to support it", but for me and others it's "is oni's beh.avior something i want to support", and the answer is no, suppor.ting it is fund.amentally bad and working against it is good.
and again, there is a dist.inction here. i've never said that he shouldn't be co.mpensated for his wo.rk because it's based on oth.ers'. what he shouldn't be co.mpensated for is sell.ing ACC.ESS to his work, especia.lly when he's just se.lling copys. if he se.lls a milli.on copies, he's doing no more wo.rk than if he sells 50, but all of that is done with cha.rs he didn't make, chars somebo.dy el.se explic.itly holds the right to make mo.ney off, and they're not getting squat for it. if he wants to charge for his w.ork, he can charge for his WORK. that's done by commissio.n, he's getting paid to do wo.rk. if he's not making enough that way, he can try chargi.ng more, or learning to w.ork faster. but ta.king mo.ney to produce (at no cos.t or effo.rt to himself) copi.es of other peo.ples shit, in addition to his own, without pay.ing the other person, is wrong, and it pretty much is just stamping a t-shirt with an offici.al drawing. in that case, the person sel.ling them is at least providing the shirt, which takes a lot of material each instance, rather than a one-time co.st in effort. and fuck, oni pa.ys more to the partners in hen.tai-united who do nothing but handle a few tech.nical details and ad.vertising, than to the people who's mat.erial he's using without any per.mision. he probably p.ays more to them than he gets himself, which if true makes him not just wrongheaded, but stupid.
yes, i know that if oni doesn't get his mon.ey he won't produce as much art, but boo-fucking-hoo. he should find a better way to do it, one that doesn't suggest that the only people who should enjoy art are those that p.ay for it. because the worst situation is that more artists think the p.aywal approach is an okay way to behave, which means that there's much less art for everybody because everybody will be trying to slice off their piece of the pie and keep everybody but their own subs.cribers from enjoying it. the various art may still exist, but, without rampant shar.ing, very few will be able to have access to any of it, and for those who don't, it might as well not exist. the greater good is to discourage this philosophy in any way we can and increase the number of people made happy by what is there. if he continues to produce art, we'll continue to shar.e it free.ly, because that's the next best scenario. in all of this, there are still other ways to make mon.ey in 34-art that doesn't deprive the co.mmunity of access to the field. or, if he wants to control part of a field, get his own field. if he can't make enough doing that, then maybe he can't hack art as a career and should just do it as a hobby, and get a real j.ob like everybody else. anyway, if he's willing to reach a much smaller audience, probably a tenth of one percent of who would otherwise enjoy it, for a tiny bit more cash (still not even as much as i make in a month, apparently), instead of spreading his art to everybody who wants it for a little less of a payday, then he's not really much of an artist in my book.
Also, illegally redistributing his art is not "working against his behavior," the absolute "best case scenario," form your perspective at least, is that it would lead to decreased sign-ups at HU, to the point that it would no longer be viable for him to continue there. All that would mean is that he wouldn't be producing the HU pieces that you seem so determined to "get out to the world" and would go back from producing two pieces per week to only producing one, and the contents of that one would be entirely determined by what people were willing to commission, which means no Cheetara, no Velma, no Smurfette, no Homestuck, no DC villains, no Dragon Age, etc. None of the stuff he's been able to add to the world via a support mechanism that allows him to be more flexible in the subject matter. The world would only be a lesser place for your efforts.
"if he se.lls a milli.on copies, he's doing no more wo.rk than if he sells 50,"
Yeah, but selling millions isn't likely. I think you greatly overestimate the profit margins on these sites. The reason selling access is better than selling the individual works is that it allows for more income than one individual can likely afford. It's why we have more movies that are screened in theaters for as many people as can afford a ticket than we do that are entirely paid for by a single individual for his own personal use. It's why we have more comics that are paid for by thousands of customers than we do comics that are entirely paid for out of the pockets of a single customer. There are some generous commission customers out there, I'm sure, but none so generous that they could comfortably support an artist on their own.
"yes, i know that if oni doesn't get his mon.ey he won't produce as much art, but boo-fucking-hoo. he should find a better way to do it, one that doesn't suggest that the only people who should enjoy art are those that p.ay for it."
I think he's already put out a call for suggestions on that. If you can think of a better way for him to make money off his work than HU, better than direct commissions, and something that is doable in the real world, then I'm sure he'd be happy if you shot him an email about it.
"or, if he wants to control part of a field, get his own field."
Like, maybe, his own site?
"anyway, if he's willing to reach a much smaller audience, probably a tenth of one percent of who would otherwise enjoy it, for a tiny bit more cash (still not even as much as i make in a month, apparently), instead of spreading his art to everybody who wants it for a little less of a payday, then he's not really much of an artist in my book. "
So to you, an artist is only an artist if he cares more about spreading his art as widely as possible than he does about being able to support himself? That's a pretty sad world you live in.
The vast majority of comic books made today are available digitally. Now, there are a few ways you can get these comics. The first is you can download the comic off a torrent or rapidshare-type site for free, which is illegal. Piracy is something comic book creators expect to happen, just as businesses expect shrinkage.
The second option is you can buy the comic on it's own from whatever sites it is available on (comixology, Marvel digital, et cetera). I'd like to note here that you can also save these comics, and thus own them in digital form. This also allows you to show it to friends (if they are physically near your computer/smartphone/tablet/whatever), but you cannot legally send the file to them.
The third option is that you can subscribe for what is usually a cheaper price than buying each individual issue, and you will receive them as they come out. This is most comparable to paysites and there are also packages that let you subscribe to several different similar comics in one fee (like, say, every Spider-Man spin-off being produced) or even the entire library that the site has (Marvel Unlimited).
The fourth option is actually buying a physical issue of the comic, which you can then do with as you please. This has been being done for thousands of years and isn't really relevant to the conversation, so let's not go into it.
What you are arguing is that, because they have already made the work and have no real hand in it's distribution, comic book creators should give you all their work for free. And the thing is, they sort of do, because they know it's all gonna get thrown out into the open anyway. The same goes for Oni's stuff.
When you buy or subscribe to a comic, you are in many ways just tipping the creators for their work, and supporting them at the same time. The comic Freakangels was released weekly on the web because Warren Ellis was well aware of this and knew that people who like comics know how to get them for free, but will pay for the ones that they enjoy. Every trade of Freakangels was financially successful.
You are completely free to go places other than Hentai United and view the uncensored pictures that Oni has worked on. This is, however, piracy. Oni knows that people will do this, and likely does not care that they do. What he does care about is getting paid for his work and receiving a steady income, which Hentai United provides. They are also aware that everything will get leaked on to the web, but just as aware that admirers will gladly pay a fee to continually and legally see what he puts out. These people do it because they like his work, or they're just really horny and have money to burn.
My point is, Oni is essentially just working as a digital comics artist, and while on a smaller scale, he is also making less money. Hentai United are acting as his publisher. The only downside is that there is no option to pay less to just get Oni's work, but that is not his fault. And honestly, you could legitimately argue that HU should have an option for that, just as I could argue it wouldn't be financially feasible for them. But that steps away from the comics industry and more into the porn industry, so let's not.
And also, stop the philosophic BS and FAP
- Reply
TL;DR
FAP FAP FAP FAP FAP!
Just to cover my bases, though, let's ignore parody and just call it fan-art. Fan-art is fan-art and exists everywhere. Fan-art is sold all around the world in many forms, and Oni is not even really asking you to buy fan-art. He is asking you to pay him to draw a picture, or pay him to have access to the pictures he draws. What he actually draws in those pictures is irrelevant. It's also worth noting that pretty much every artist in the goddamn world does commissions, both on characters they own and characters they do not.
And really, no matter how much you claim it's piracy, the creators don't care and the law doesn't care. Why should you?
I'm not going to narc him out, but he's still a big fucking hypocrite. He's a pirate begging others not to pirate his work. i'm not sure why paheal even cares that artists want to be DNP.
No person has ever sucessfully forced anyone, using the law, to take down their porn of other people's copyrighted pictures. That useless hack Zimmerman tried it a few years back and his ass is still raw from it. He hasn't done a "for profit" picture of copyrighted characters for a very long time because his attempt to make others stop pirating his piracy simply drew attention from the real owners of those likenesses.
- Reply
- Reply
That being said, I'm not saying he has the right to have his work taken down from sites like these. Them doing so is just respecting the work of the artists. And just because Oni censors his work doesn't mean he's whining about people pirating it. It's called a teaser.
damn thunder cats symbol get out of the way
Nice!
FAP! FAP! FAP!
Fuck that, and fuck Oni. If he wants to charge for his work, that's fine... but it seems pretty shitty to me to take advantage of a free site to tease people into viewing his work elsewhere that you'll have to pay for. Saying that people complaining about this image is just them being cheap and acting entitled is one thing, but if Oni wants to charge for his work, then he should have to pay to advertise it. And if he's going to be cheap, then anyone else is entitled to be cheap by complaining about his business model.