Essays: Copyright on Layout Images

All right, ladies and gentlemen, let's just think this through for a moment.

All anime art, such as screencaptures, cels and scans of artbooks, that is displayed in any way shape or form in online fansites is a blatant violation of copyright. All of it. It doesn't matter whether you own the artbook or DVD in question, it's still illegal by most terms of international copyright law unless you went and got permission from the rights-holder.

Got that? Good.

Now. We fans generally escape prosecution for these illegal activities because a) most anime fandoms aren't big enough to bother with and b) the publishers of the materials probably recognize that our copying and distribution among ourselves of such materials does not lead us to not buy the original materials from them. I know of few fans (of the sort who exchange these materials, at any rate) who are really willing, in the long term, to settle for a digital reproduction. I suspect that, in the back of their avaricious little minds, the publishers think of what we do as something like free advertising. It spreads the fanbase, who then buy their products, and everyone's happy.

That does not mean it's legal. The copyright holder has the sole right to control distribution and reproduction. Owning a copy of the work in question does not give the purchaser any of those rights.

This is one reason it always amuses me to see anime fans trying to assert copyrights over the images on their webpages. If the image in question has been altered, legally speaking, that only makes the fan in question guilty of two violations of copyright: reproduction and alteration both. The only way you can assert copyright over something like that is if you altered it so much that it is no longer recognizably the source you started with, but rather an item of original creative work. I have yet to see a layout image that qualifies.

Of course I think that if a fan went to the trouble of scanning an image or altering it then that fan deserves credit for the effort involved from we, the community for whose edification and enjoyment the work was done. If anyone else copies the image in question I believe that person has an ethical obligation to acknowledge the person whose work made it available in digital form. This is the standard I practice on my own pages and request of my own visitors. I wish, in fact, that this standard were more stringently adhered to, because as is the most I can acknowledge in many cases is the person who maintains the archive I got the image from and not the person who first made it available.

I do not believe that any of us have any call to attempt to limit the further copying and distribution of our various illegally posted images. That's absurd and hypocritical. If a person wishes to assert exclusive copyright over their ideas or text, well, I disapprove but that is at least an un-conflicted application of copyright law. To assert the right to limit reproduction and distribution of images, altered or otherwise, that legally belong to someone else, or layouts based on such images, is either despicable or brainless. It's also totally illegal and unenforcable.

In addition, to invoke a law which we all (those of us who are honest) spend some time earnestly hoping to escape the notice of is plain stupid.

To top it all off, does any intelligent person openly post anything to the web that s/he truly wishes to control the reproduction and distribution of? I think such an action would invalidate the "intelligent" clause in that sentence. The web operates by copying files from one computer (the server) to another (the one used by the reader); this is the function of loading. Only an idiot places information in a digital format, the most easily copyable format currently available, and then places that file into circulation in a system that demands reproduction of the file, and then actually believes it is feasible or reasonable to limit distribution of the file. The most we can do is ask nicely, depend on the basic decency of our visitors, and realize that some of them just won't be decent people and them's the breaks.

There are only a few fan requests to comply with copyright that I think escape egregious hypocrisy: those posted by maintainers of image/music archives who ask that we all support the artists by buying the original once we've examined the online versions; those made by fansubbers, to stop distribution of the fansub after a licensed release comes out; and those made by authors of translations or genuinely transformative creative work.

So let's just have a little common sense, here, yes?