I find it slightly amusing that Alperium should protest about rips when he posts Spiderman images which are protected by copyright which can clearly be seen on the Spiderman site. He gives no credit to Marvel or Columbia pictures nor does he supply permission. How is this permissable?

fan art...

Fan art or not ,there is still an obligatoion to abide by copyright and the intellectual property rights of others. You cannot take someone elses art and call it your own and use it to advance your own position. I draw your attention to Apocalypse who produced a complete suite for Spiderman using his own original art and thereby honoured the copyright laws. He did not use any Spiderman registered art. Theft is theft and cannot be justified.

Indeed sydneysiders.
And fan art falls in under this section in our rules (which can be found on the About page)
and is moderated according to this:

So, if Marvel steps up and says 'Oy nutter - that's a no-go. The webdude is ours' - we'll remove it.

It falls into 'fair use'.

Most people know, I am not a huge supporter of fan art being put in with original work... but, adapting the fan art for another use and with a skinning program that I haven't yet figured out, like bootskin or logon, does qualify and falls into fair use. It may even apply to wallpapers depending on how it's used or adapted.

In Alperium's defense..he has faced this issue before and handled it with class and maturity and has since followed the site guidelines (to the best of my limited knowledge) and has also become a very welcome contributor and helpful peer on the site.

If you feel the work is a RIP, it's best to report it to a mod or admin through the PM and enclose whatever links you have to what you believe is the original work.

It's been brought up that in future updates of the upload section, there may be a place for people to actually post such links and permissions with the uploaded work to make all of this easier. I hope it happens.

Finally, PM Alperium and ask him yourself. He's a great person to get to know.

Fan Art to me is just an excuse or a convenient rationalization for wrong doing. Look at it this way. I may be a fan of Ford Mustang cars. I see one on the street and think to myself, I like that so I will take it and use it. Quite rightfully , later on , I get arrested for car theft. In court I state in my defense that under fair use and as a fan of Ford Mustangs I took the vehicle so therefore I have done no wrong! How far do you think ANYONE will get using that for a defense in a law court? The same applies here. If work is not our own, if we do not have permission to use it then it should not be allowed to be uploaded. If no credit is given to the original author we are as good as claiming it for ourselves. If we want people to respect our copyrights then we need to learn to respect others. I have the greatest of respect for Snowman, however ,I feel waiting for an owner to make a complaint is somewhat of a cop out on responsibility when we know the art to not be that of the uploader. It would also seem that one rule was set for Apocalypse and another applies here. I question the consistency and legality. A good site to visit is NZFACT.ORG.New Zealand Federation of Artists Against Copyright Theft. Weta Studio's, Universal Pictures, Sony, and a large number of organisations and artists are members of this growing organization. Copyright law on an International basis is explained extremely simply and clearly. I am sure Alperium is a nice guy. He could be nicer. That is all I am suggesting.

Again I have a problems.
About my SpiderMAN series: I think this is not RIP literally, because I have not copied a picture from Sony or Marvel.
I used my model and my rendering, I have copied style only, otherwise these works not
have sense, because it's really fan art.

Mountainhawk I have more spiderman bootskins than Al does and I'm sure if there was a bigger offender of fan art use, it would be me and not Alperium. This site allows for the use of fan art and if site moderators felt that these items should be removed, they have the ability to remove them and I wouldn't object. I submitted a Captain America wb skin last month, it's considered fan art - if it wasn't, it would have been rejected and no one would be allowed to download it. Fan Art takes into account fair use of said images as long as said far art isn't being published for the purpose of making a profit and the last time I checked, all of the skins on this site aside from the master/premium skins are free - we don't profit from any of the skins we've uploaded to the site. It's the same thing if someone freehand sketches a copyrighted image - the copyright still exists and the sketch would be considered a derivative work without permission from the copyright holder - do you think Sony or Marvel is going to chase after & sue everyone who draws an image of Spiderman even though it's technically a copyright infringement? Certainly not because it's considered fan art, even though copyright law says you need permission to actually do this. Could they if they wanted? Technically they might be able to but they're not going to. The copyright owners recognize that this type of non-profit activity is harmless to them and in fact promotes interest & awareness in said characters and probably gets more people purchasing the copyrighted material/imagery that is for sale legally which improves their bottom line. Yes I myself along with many others have submitted bootskins/logons/other skins using copyrighted material (images) without getting explicit permission from Sony/Marvel/DC (Microsoft, etc.) but fan art is OK because the owners of the copyrights say that it's OK; otherwise everyone who's ever scribbled a picture of a superhero, posted a pic on a website, printed a picture from a website (superman, spiderman, etc.) is guilty of this infringement.

Where you get into problems is when you start taking these images and publish them large scale and sell them at a profit (or attempt to make a profit: you may be a lousy business man and not make a cent but if it was your intention to make money doing this, they can still get you for this) - this is the line of work of the copyright owner at which point when you are discovered you will be told in no uncertain terms to stop what you are doing and if you don't they'll sue your but in court & win.

The internet makes this problem even more complicated because you're making use of a medium that can technically reach every corner of the globe.

However in the case of my 16 color bootskins and 256 color logons of which I charge a grand total of nothing, I would say this falls into the category of fair use. I don't make any profit from this, the only thing I gain is the satisfaction of making a bootskin that looks decent in 16 shades of it's glory or a logon that greets me when I bootup my pc or the picture of a comic book superhero when I hit my start button.

I'm nearing the end of my verbose post which I'll wrap up this way....

If you don't like it that I or anyone else on this site uses a comic book superhero as the subject of our skin that we upload to this site, there is a simple method of dealing with this problem:
1. don't download the skin the we've uploaded to the site
2. have the site reject all skins (new & existing) that include fan art in all of it's forms
3. also have the site reject skins that contain copyrights/trademarks in the form of names as well, I'm guilty of using the word "vista" alot, a few xp's every now & then as well and heck I've used that vista globe logo & text alot, better turf all of those skins as well - don't worry about getting Marvel or Sony mad, I would be afraid to get Microsoft angry: those guys have alot of money

Mountainhawk my only request to you would be to stop busting Al's or anybody else's chops over fan art and how we shouldn't use it, I'm a fan and I make use of said art in my skins and never request a cent for anything I've uploaded. If I were to ever (fat chance I'm sure) make a dollar doing this work I would want it to be on the merit of my own work and not someone elses so we can be crystal clear on that issue. When I'm asked by the site moderators to stop submitting work that makes use of fan art I shall do so.

... Maybe I'll start working on linux themed/style skins... wonder if I would offend anyone with those, maybe I should speak with Linus Torvalds first though.   

Wow. I think I finally get it.

If the fan art is offered as a wall and is turned into a boot, for example...the author who transformed the wall is simply offering it in another format. And here, from what I can see, for free. No profit. So...the originator is not necessarily losing any 'money' since the original work is not offered in the new format. This would be 'fair use'. (Jafo can tell you if I finally got it right.)

What is missing, often, is 'credit' to the original author. I think that is very important.

Taking a wall and reposting it in the same format with no credit would be an outright rip.

Policing every RUSH boot or Spidey logon may not be easy. Then you have the 'mistakes', like I have made, on items that actually had permission..or in Alperiums case, not really a rip of another's wall .

You're definitely right Po' and that is something that I didn't include in my post above; crediting the original author. In my own personal case I should definitely be mentioning that images were obtained from DC Comics or Marvel comics website (for my spiderman bootskins for example) and used strictly for fan art purposes only - I'm slacking and will definitely start including that info again in the skin description.

You're right though, I would consider taking someone else's wall and posting it as your own is an outright rip.

Policing any of the numerous skin submissions to this site is a herculean task to say the least, I don't envy the job of the moderator who has to look through the thousands of skin submissions that this site receives monthly, annually, etc. - I'm sure it's a thankless job and a chore for tired eyes after a while.

I am guilty of uploading a $hit load of skins all at once, flooding the site isn't smart and it's harder for the mod's to keep up with all the work. In hindsight I should be smarter and more sympathetic to the people that have to approve the skin submissions. I will work on being much smarter about batch uploading my new stuff to the site and maybe I should slow down too; I'm definitely hooked on the site but sometimes I am guilty of being outrageous with the amount of stuff I upload. My apologies to any & all admins/mods who may be reading this post.

Pretty much.

It's quaint...but I'm an Aussie...and until G Bush and our PM [Banzai Bush] got together with a Free-Trade agreement we [Aussies] had a different set of copyright laws to those of the US.

Ours had NO allowance/dispensation relating to 'fair use' and/or 'fan art'. It was infact illegal to tape your LP or copy your CD music elsewhere, etc.

Totally. No 'ifs' no 'buts'.

Now, we are the same as the US, but in either case Wincustomize.com is an American site and thus is controlled by US Laws [or we are obliged to, though being a privately owned site the ultimate determination remains that of the owner/s].

So...

Fair use and Fan Art are legitimate inclusions within our copyright management/handling.

In response to MountainHawk and his Ford Mustang all I can suggest is that you read up on US Copyright Law and you may see where your analogy is fundamentally flawed...

i think they would rather see you keep up your uploading and maybe add another mod to the mix rather than drop uploads to keep the pressure down..i may be wrong tho..




I'll suggest to all that packaging "variants" would be beneficial.. like size or color variants of the same skin....putting all the variants of a specific skin in to one file would cut down on the # of things to be modded...I see quite a few things in widget's ,Wall's,.etc that could have been packaged as 1 upload...it gets silly seeing 12 different colored variants of the same thing uploaded as seperate skins...

not pointing any fingers.. just a thought..

Well, well nice discussion.
I have reuploaded ALL Spider-MAN series with credit to
(Original: ©2007 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. MARVEL, and all Marvel characters including the Spider-Man, Sandman and Venom characters ™ & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
http://spiderman3.sonypictures.com/)
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Thank you guys for protection.

also remember fan art is limited to pop culture idolism (IE a corporate or entity in the pop culture lime light)...taking a private partys stuff and porting to another format is not included in fair use... there is a difference between being a fan/supporting a foot ball club by making fan art and ripping a skinner/graphical artists works even if the credit is there.....the latter is not covered by fair use.....


and if i remember correctly. if the Company or entity of whose images are used or simulated to make fan art requests and or is known publicly to not allow fan art .. any fan art comprised of those parties images and logos and/or copys-simulations of those images will be rejected at WC...


typically many corporate entitys keep a tight reign on their logos and the use of them.... nascar for instance you must be licenced to use or simulate, for public display any image that displays their logos and or personel.

jafo.. correct me if im wrong....

Credit was given.
I don't RIP the Marvel.
I use my OWN models and my OWN rendering including their styles.
I don't understand where is RIP?
I copied their style, because it's FAN ART.