I haven’t made a goddamn dime off of SCP Foundation.
And that’s been fine with me up until today.
One of the things that I accepted when SCP Foundation became a “big thing” is that everyone else was going to make money off of it except me. Artists who make T-shirts or keychains or sell fanart. People publishing SCP Foundation art books or calendars. Bumper stickers. Cosplay accoutrements. All that jazz.
I was okay with this, because I was certain that everyone involved in this was going to remember one of the key clauses of the SCP Foundation license: the concept of “Share-Alike.” You can recoup your costs, you can even make a bit of profit if you want, but you have to remember that you’re not the only one who can do this. We’re all leeching off of old man Izumi Kato’s statue, after all, and he’s graciously allowed us to keep doing so when he could have shut us down at any time. He even lets us use the likeness of his artwork on our web site so long as we don’t sell anything based on it. And we’ve been ever so grateful for that.
I have to admit that it’s gotten harder to keep this upbeat attitude as SCP Foundation becomes a bigger thing. Full-on Triple-A games that openly admit to having taken ideas from stuff me and my friends wrote ten years ago are coming out, and I’ve grinned and bore it, because they worked hard to make those games, and even if I’m a little resentful of the fact that they piggybacked off of the work we put in, I’ve always reminded myself that our ideas were not original, we drew from tropes and concepts already present in fiction, and games like Control and SOMA are taking their own individual takes. But I’ve been okay with it. Because I was happy knowing that the things I made, the characters and worlds I created, was inspiring other people to create, and that they would, in their own turn, inspire others. A cascade of creativity and awesomeness.
Andrei Dushkin, of ARTSCP, is a fucking bastard. He broke the Share-Alike clause for personal gain, and even worse, he is trying to cut other people out of the pool. He is taking the goodwill that our community built up, that we’ve relied on to remain an open creative community, and he’s trying to keep it all for himself. And for all I care, he can burn in hell.
I don’t know what the hell I can do to help. But at the very least, I can spread the word.
I am the author who wrote under the name of “DrClef.” I stand with SCPRU.
Details here: https://scp-wiki-official.tumblr.com/post/189014558982/scp-community-6-months-ago-we