Article 13 Approved ... How will this affect Patreon?

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43

I have to say this is really some backwards logic you’re employing here.

Answer me this. Is it a breach of the copyright law if you and your friends form a cover band? Or when you guys play some Metallica songs in a bar, for a paid gig? Since when does it matter when it’s your song or not?

I’m not making 5-7 figures playing someone else’s song, or drawing someone else’s character. I’m making a humble living money for fanart. I am not a competitor to these people, I am not a revenue sink to them in any way, and I don’t make any of their purchasable content free or anything. Everything I do, is new content that goes on top of all the other fanart, which goes on top of all the official content. I don’t steal anything, and in fact in many ways I take part in freshening their franchise and keep it relevant in public eye.

I’m sorry but it seems a lot of you guys don’t seem to have given any thought regarding this and base your opinions on some artificial ethical merit that don’t and shouldn’t in fact exist.

I understand that you might be finding little merit in the type of content I am doing - I mean, that’s apparent. You want your product/project/whatever to be owned entirely by yourself and you want to be known for it and perhaps be famous for it. I understand, that’s lovely. You perhaps would never do the work I elect to do, because it wouldn’t feel right to you that you’re putting so much work on something that isn’t licensed to you. That’s fine. However, disrespecting fan artists by claiming that their work has less merit, and even incurring that they’re guilty for what they’re doing - it’s childish. I don’t genuinely believe you care for the intellectual rights for these companies, I rather believe you feel somewhat gutted about these people making a revenue off of doing work based on others’ creations and getting attention for it.

I’m involved in a company that owns some IP rights to things as well. I own some share in those properties by proxy, too. I don’t know why it is in any way a hindrance to me if someone else uses these IP-protected characters or whatever in a fashion that does not in fact steal any effort or resources from our side of things. Not even if they make more money than us, it just means we’ve been done a poor assessment of what the audience wants so other people came in to fill that gap.

EDIT: If you think we have it easy by using other franchises’ intellectual property, please also consider, doing this we already sacrifice many benefits other creators reap from. We can’t enlist our project-size works under our business names, we often cannot put them in our resumes and most often than not we can’t even use them as references in our portfolios. We have to omit these projects when we give people our body of work. It, by nature, stays and is doomed to stay as works of enthusiasm. Using Patreon and other platforms, we get paid by donations, from the people we attract and get in touch, and that sum is doomed to stay in humble territory. I am not saying these to mean that because we make so little money it’s okay. You effectively claim fanartists’ work is comparable to acts of felony and if they really were, no amount of revenue would be able to justify it. But that simply isn’t the case: I am harping on the discrepancy of revenue, because in no way what we do actually causes the official creators to lose any revenue. That’s important - that’s what truly matters in a debate about copyright. Or felony, for that matter.

Furthermore, it never means we don’t pay heed to license holder wishes. In fact, there ARE times our work ends up cutting into the profit of official creators by pure absolute mistake. There are times the official representatives want us to take down certain artworks. I can count a couple incidents where our fanarts got so popular in the internet’s eye that it actually affected the SEO. They asked us to hold our content back for a while when they needed their SEO edge while they were pushing a new product. We obeyed it, and after a couple months or so, we were able to post that content again.

44

Music played over the radio, in a restaurant or bar or over Spotify and other streaming services is considered a public performance and there is a fee radios, venues and streaming services pay to licence the music.
When I perform in a club, the club owner fills in a form with the songs I am performing so that money goes to publishers. If I perform my songs I also get payed copyright fees for my music on top of the money I make for the performance. This is why you can play in a venue without breaching the copyright law …

I don’t disrespect fan artists and I don’t give them less merit for not creating their art from scratch. I know some of them are very talented. I am also not “gutted” because you are making a revenue off of work that doesn’t belong to you. This is your choice and I respect that but you know that you are using somebody else art and you could possibly be shut down at any time.
The little amount of money you make will not stop that from happening.
If tomorrow one of your work goes viral and you gain 3000 Patrons and you make, let’s say $6000/month, what would you do? Also, because now you don’t make “little money” anymore would you consider getting in touch with the publisher of the work an tell him “hey, I am making a lot of money using your art-work”. I don’t think the publish will smile at you and say “Oh, thank you. I appreciate you trying to freshening my franchise and keep it relevant in public eye”.

I would be so lucky if I could rearrange famous songs and make money out of it. But this is against the law. That’s why YouTube doesn’t pay (or only pay a very small percentage) money for creators who upload guitar lessons and covers of copyrighted songs.

I once posted a lesson of Hotel California. The publisher took down the video. No question asked.
He was making money out of my video through YouTube ads but still he took the video down.

So when you say “I am not a competitor to these people” or “I am using their work but I am not making that much money out of it” you only see one side of the coin. Your side.

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I don’t know where you live but that’s impossible to keep track of, and a lot of establishments in the world don’t bother. It is an impossible ideal, not to mention backwards, to try to fee artists for doing performances in pubs, using licensed songs.

We all can be shut down at any time, whether we use Twitch, Youtube or Patreon. Other than that, my work belongs to me because I make it. That’s all there is to it.

I don’t take this excuse for anything. We are against Article 13 because fan arts are legitimate. Guilt-tripping artists just because they’re coming knocking on our doors about this petty stuff is unwarranted. Saying that we should’ve been more careful, is simply disrespectful, no matter what you claim your words mean. This should never be the case.

Apart from the ethical reasons of “who owns what”, this argument’s loose on many other reasons as well. Being an artist does not inherently come packaged with the innate ability to construct your own fictitious material. We live in the age of merch and adjacent material, and a lot of fan artists add their own spice in the material and sometimes people seek for it. That’s why so many cons have artists alleys where people directly sell THEIR WORK. Just because the work is a drawing of a Pikachu doesn’t make it any less of their work, and it’s beneficial for literally everybody when someone wants to buy it to hang it on a wall.

Being a fan artist is a wonderful first step into having being a creator as your profession, not only just your passion. This purism argument is both mean AND demeaning. I don’t get what we’re getting out of wishing less people to earn money for what they like to be doing. We live in the age of crushing student loan debts and people having to waste their lives in dehumanizing minimum wage jobs despite their talents that can be better utilized in platforms like this. Having the gall to argue that big corporations are in the right for mitigating these budding artists’ ability to provide the audience such a service, when they themselves don’t lose anything due to the actions of such artists, is gratuitous in how morbid it is.

You know being a Disc Jockey is a thing.

And that’s not right. It shouldn’t be right there either. That’s what we’re trying to say here. But things are getting more and more grim. This is entirely why people have started raising a stink.

Please educate me about their side of the coin and tell me what they have to lose for allowing budding artists to exercise their talent in depicting their favorite characters for the rest of the world to see.

I am a creator of both original works and fan works. When I do my original works, people come to me for the official stuff, but it should never stop them from seeking for fan stuff either. My biggest wish is to become big enough with my original works so that other artists can make a worthy living for themselves too, using my characters in ways that I didn’t have time to. My side of the coin advocates sharing. Your side of the coin advocates restrictions and creative constipation.

I am appalled and embarrassed that Patreon, a platform that adopted “financial survivability from creative freedom in international scale” as its entire motto, seems to house so many people that are so prone to outwardly shut down people for trying to achieve that for whatever reason. Maybe it is due to a misplaced sense of antagonistic purism. Maybe it’s due envy. Who knows.

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46

Main problem is, there is still a very conservative thinking about copyright.

Artists, who play instruments, paint their own pictures and write their own books are one category, and sadly, they rarely realize, its 2018, and not the middle ages anymore.

Art has many more areas now, not just the mentioned ones. We live in a world of parodies, re-dubs, music covers, movie reviews, mash-ups, critics, fan writings, memes, tutorials, help videos, teaching videos on several subjects including exisisting arts, documentaries, photomanipulation arts, game reviews, sampling… and i could continue.

All of these areas support the original artists or the used materials through free advertising. Every movie, game, or music gain attention through reviews, covers, critics, whatever. It is a fact.

I am a writer as well, and yeah, i make my own art with a novel. But i also work in other areas, like parodies and reviews. I’am so surprised how a lot of artists share that conservative thinking about creating art, and accept that oldschool thinking about copyright… Supporting such a backstep move on the matter will result frustration and finding shady ways by artists to continue their work.

Art is not just painting a picture anymore. Try to keep up with times a little.

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