This is mostly a question for folks I know or have interacted with, so I'm hoping it doesn't break containment and get me screamed at by randos, but I see posts like this one sometimes and just... really hope people aren't downloading and making copies of my fics and art without permission??
I know it's a tricky subject and I'm very much in favor of AO3, Open Doors, and other fanworks archives. Fandom is a part of culture. It's important to study, and it's also great for people to be able to reread (and re-look at/listen to) their favorite fanworks.
I also realize that once you've put something on the internet, you no longer have any control over it.
However, this recent push to download and makes copies of others' fanworks edges a little too close to art theft for my liking.
As someone who's been making fanart since the 90s, I've had my images stolen more times than I can count. And while it's worse when other people use it to make money, it also REALLY REALLY sucks when they pass it around with little or no credit given, talking amongst themselves and never saying anything nice to me about it. I've had people do this in Discord servers, on Tumblr, AO3, Instagram, tiktok, Twitter, Pinterest, and doubtless other social media. In my opinion, all of that is art theft.
Fan creators have the right to delete their works—hell, I deleted all of my art from Tumblr years ago and have also deleted lots of older images from AO3. Yes, I could orphan them, but then I would lose all control over them, which is the opposite of what I want (I know that deleting them from Tumblr only removes them from my account, but that was the best I could do). If I delete something from AO3, I think it goes without saying that I don't want other people distributing copies they might have made of it. And I don't think that's unreasonable?? But I've seen numerous cases where fan creators have deleted something, and then other people start passing around files of the works, which just seems deeply wrong to me?
Another reason I personally don't like it when people copy my works without permission is because I edit my published fics and art sometimes. So if someone downloads them rather than going to my AO3—where they might be more likely to let me know they actually liked the thing—they'll never see any improvements or changes I might have made. Honestly, I wish it was possible to entirely turn off the 'download' button on all of my works just to make it a little harder to copy them (yes, I realize this would make it so Calibre doesn't work, but I think AO3's efforts to block spam and ai scrapers means that Calibre doesn't work anyway, so 🤷).
I do think fanbinding is a bit different, because the person using your work is making another fanwork out of it. It's transformative. They're not just printing it on shitty paper and stuffing it in a binder without asking your permission first—that's not transformative.
Anyway, idk, it's a tricky and nuanced subject. But I think the bare minimum that people can do before they copy someone's fanworks is to ask them for permission?? Isn't that what permissions statements are for? Even blanket permission is generally only meant to let others makes transformative works based on your works. I've never seen anyone say "yeah feel free to copy my stuff word-for-word or pixel-by-pixel and do whatever you want with it for all time." And that's basically what posts like the one I linked to above are suggesting.
So idk, what do y'all think?
