So, let me get this straight...
You’re an ignorant twat who sees nothing wrong with doing something wrong because “eh it’s been like that anyway”, “be grateful we’re giving you exposure even though we’re actually not” and because “I myself proffted off of other people’s work, so it’s a good thing!”
Sincerely, sit down, shut the fuck up, and listen to people who actually have something to say in this argument, because it’s literally their right to do so.
But let’s go through this absolute bog of bullshit in order, shall we?
The loss of control is a matter of multiple aspects, including two different issues of copyright infringement, but also including potential personal damages (this is especially important within the circles that deal with BL/GL etc.)
First of all, yes, the whole matter of corporate IP. Yes, it’s different from Western laws. Get over it and respect it instead of blaming it because it doesn’t suit your tastes, it’s not your place to question or protest it. In fact, Fair Use is not a guarantee even in the West: the owner of the material has the right to deny Fair Use of their works, and they have every right to do so, so long as they use a binding means of establishing the prohibition (disclaimers themselves are not enough, but that also means that if the product is being put out under a specific license, that license can include the clause prohibiting even Fair Use).
Also, as far as many cases of people claiming Fair Use in the West, profitting off the content makes it less likely for the content to be considered protected as Fair Use; the minutae of that are up to the specific cases and lawyers though, obviously. But it does mean that IP holders have every right to claim copyright strikes if the work infringes on their established specific copyrights.
Many companies in Japan also permit the production of both fanworks in general but also the sale of them, so long as no profit is made. So if some jackass steals the art and starts gaining monetary gain from it (offering it as prints, for instance, a ridiculously rampant practice, especially for “merch”), they could get either the specific artists in question in trouble with the company, or could lead to the entire fandom getting fucked over as a result, leading to the IP holders prohibiting not just profitting off the product in question, but the creation of fanworks for it altogether (sure, there will always be people going “screw it” and not obliging, but some people actually try to respect the will of others instead of taking what they want just-because). And they have every right to it.
Second of all, there is a matter of actual personal copyright... and people infringing not only on an author’s right to their content (applies to especially original works, but to some extent to fanart as well), but also breaking Terms of Service of practically every single social media website in existence - but I will get to that later, on the point of your Oh So Grand “Career”, worry not.
And this links to the third issue; control over the distribution of the work in question. Many artists choose to delete their old works for one reason or another. They have every right to want those things gone (and no, they won’t give a damn about it still sitting in your hard drive - but they will give a damn about it still continuing to be spread online). Reposting takes that capability away from them.
And if it’s just a matter of wanting to bury one’s less skilled or cringe past, this can also be an attempt to retain control over narratives that are harmful to the author online (and sometimes it’s just someone actually turning a new leaf, looking at what they used to say and post, realising it’s harmful for one reason or another, and not wanting to be associated with it anymore; it’s not impossible for people to stop supporting harmful ideologies and they should be allowed to cut free of that, especially if that cutting free also means diminishing the spread of that ideology by getting rid of a source of something as influential as art speaking in supprot of it).
But it can also be a problem offline.
I have seen artists, especially Asian ones (mainl Japan, Korea, China), but also some instances from the West, where the artist would produce content of things their family or real life environment does not approve of. If their identity is compromised or leaked, it is only fair for them to want to get rid of any evidence thereof to prevent getting screwed over in real life; disowned, bullied, fired, etc. You have no right to take the possibility of preventing that from them just because “but muh animu pictures”.
“It’s too late to do anything”, oh no, I guess we have no choice but to sit there twiddling out hands and let things happen then, instead of trying to instill change bit by bit, then. This is obviously a disproportionate comparison, but you know what else was also “too late to do anything about it, it’s already too widespread”? Racism. So guess what people did? Started spreading awareness and enacting change bit by bit. Sure, we’re not out of the woods yet, but it seems to be working relatively well for something that used to be borderline the default state. It’s almost like people are actually capable of growing and changing, amazing, who’d have thought! And the website argument? To begin with, many booru sites require or regularly practice crediting. Danbooru has basically all their posts linking back to the sources and with artists properly tagged, making it easy to find credit. They also usually take the posts down on request without any fuss whatsoever. Most art aggregators can crash and burn though, it’s just a bunch of shitheads making profit off other people’s works, fuck that. And if ignorant twats get offended when they see threads spreading awareness of what’s wrong with the shit they keep propagating? Well, gee, too bad. Guess who else is offended: artists they steal from. But it’s okay, racists of the olden days have also tended to be offended whenever someone would point out that they’re in the wrong, to borrow the comparison again. Tough fucking luck, snowflake.
And now... ah yes, the wonderful, wonderful personal note.
Congratulations, you’re one of the piece of shits profitting off of the hard work of other people, just because it’s fast and easy, hope you’re proud of yourself! Now, everyone makes mistakes, but what is important is to realise them and learn and move away from them. Not double the fuck down and then make exuses to make it seem like they’re a good thing.
Especially when it’s perfectly feasible to create a resource of posts that aren’t yours, and many places offer just that. Twitter has retweets. Tumblr has reblogs. Most gallery websites offer the option to have the artwork hosted on them embedded the moment you link it somewhere else, or you could tailor your website to display an image that is at the same time a link back to the source! Shocking, I know! It’s almost like there’s a better way to do things instead of stealing and reposting art, who’d have thought!
Oh, but I guess then the likes would go to the artist rather than the reposts, such tragedy, not sure how you’d live with that-- oh, wait, it doesn’t fuck matter because you don’t deserve those interactions in the first place. You’d still keep followers, though; tumblr, for instance, is a website where many people literally thrive off of sharing curated content, and many do it with proper credit, linkback, and often even explicit permissions(!) from artists. It’s really not that bloody hard, and would still let you retain your audience. Having the cake and eating it too, and all that. Too bad you apparently never thought of that.
Oh, but that “fanbase” of yours?
Time for a rude wakeup call.
You don’t have a fanbase.
Frankly, I find it amazing that you thought you do at any point at all. They’re fans of the content you post. Not of you. And that content isn’t yours; they’re not your fans, not your fanbase. That’s why they waned when you stopped providing them with what they want, although many fans of artists will stick with them even when the artist in question changes fandoms or starts producing original works: because we are their fans, in addition to being fans of whatever they made art of that led us to finding them in the first place.
But you bring nothing of quality. You don’t add to anything. You just rehash. You’re just a convenient buffet with no inherent value beyond ease of use that they can get literally anywhere else. You are nothing. And the same goes for every single other aggregation profile or site.
You’re just a pool of stolen water for an army of lazy monkeys that just want to consume content, will see something they like, will try to find the source, realise that all they can find is a ton of carbon copies of the same kind of cesspool as what you have, and will give up. They will go hungry, because they cannot find what they wanted and liked, and the artist won’t get jackshit, either. But hey, at least you retain the views, right?
Also congratulations, you have no idea what the Terms of Service of the websites you post on are! Good job!
Most social media and galleries explicitly state in their ToS that you are only allowed to post content you own the rights to (either in the form of being the author, having acquired permission either directly from the author or in the form of the author explicitly permitting the reposting of their content, or through fair use), and that whatever content you post (assuming it already adhered to the prior rule) is protect as your intellectual property and you retain full copyright, with the exception of letting the website or service display and transform (necessity due to rescaling to fit different displays and/or cropping for thumbnails, previews, etc.) the art in order for them to be able to host it at all; it does not grant the permission for anyone else to repost the content in question.
Granted, chasing infringements on that is out of question for every single reposter, and some websites handle it better than others, but the actual rules of the services being used remain.
So again, congratulations. You are in violation of the ToS. Maybe read what you agree to on next time, before ticking that magical “I hereby acknowledge that I have read and understood the terms and conditions” box? I doubt your value-deprived ass is going to get dragged to court over it, but in terms of law, it is legally binding.
But ah, yes. The artists.
Because we should be so grateful for the tiny trickle of what few people who manage to actually find us through the slog of reverse search, while reposter accounts will gain hundrets and thousands times more drive than what goes back to us. So frankly, take the “artists in general should be grateful that their works are getting exposure” bullshit, roll it up, and stick it up your ass. If you manage to fit it in, anyway, since that space seems to already be occupied by your head, so might be a bit hard, but good luck!
I have seen not so long ago a piece of art RT’d on my twitter timeline. A really gorgeous drawing of Lust from FMA. It was clearly a repost account, it even gave “credit” to the artist (in the form of not even the full username of the author). You know how many RTs it had?
Over 13k. And 37k followers.
The original art (which WAS actually on Twitter already, on the artist’s profile)?
Less than 2k, and less than 3k followers. And what started actually bumping up the numbers was not the half-assed credit, but people linking the original in replies to the repost, allowing others to easily reach the source instead.
Now let’s assume the reposter account would have actually retweeted the art in question, instead of reposting it. You know, what would have happened?
The artist would have had 15k+ retweets of their artwork instad of 2k, 105k likes instead of 8k. Probably more followers, too. Because they wouldn’t have gotten a trickle of what the reposter gets; they’d have gotten the whole cake.
Reposters aren’t a magical funnel back to the creators; they’re leeches.
And for sources you can’t find? Well, first of all, you can thank people like yourself for that, in more ways than one. The flooding of internet websites with reposts being one side of it, the other being artists literally closing shop and deleting all their works off the internet to prevent the constant stealing and loss of control over their own work. They will do well enough locally, Japan has always had a robust support of smaller artists through events and local stores even before the internet became a thing. They don’t need to deal with the bullshit reposters keep serving them to keep creating and sharing their works; it’s the foreign audiences that will lose out on it.
Or, you know, they could have deleted them for any number of issues I listed previously. Or maybe they were ashamed of their older works... so? How is that any of your fucking right to decide on whether they have the right to delete it or not?
It’s not your work that went into it. It’s not your creation, not your skill, not your input. Not your right. So how about you respect the will of the artists who allow you to keep growing your pathetic excuse of a “career” for free instead of being a piece of shit about it and then snapping when they want any semblance of respect?
Oh, and just to get back to the point about ToS and how most Japanese artists don’t includ prohibitions on their profiles. Remember the whole “unless you have permission from the artist directly, or they have an explicit statement of permitting reposts of their work” from the Terms of Service part of this dissection of your post?
For Japanese people, they operate on permissions, not prohibitions. It is understood by default, that anything that is not explicitly stated as allowed, it is automatically not allowed. You know, kind of how consent works: you don’t just assume that a person can be freely touched just because they don’t have a badge saying “Do not touch me” on them 24/7. You need to get their permission for physical contact (unless they have a “Free Hugs!” board hanging on them; but even then, that only permits hugs, not kisses, not slaps, only hugs).
Learn more about the culture you’re proffiting off of before you start spewing more shit next time, will you?
Thank you in advance, may you grow into being less of an ignorant twat one day ♥
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