A long, long time ago, I had written an article on high speed gunnery and had formulated an entire to base it on, but the hook was built on a witty comparison to the gatling guns in modern American jet aircraft and revolvers. This was written well over half a decade ago, and while I think the whole matter was quite educative and transformative, I never pulled the trigger because there was one piece of media I needed that I simply did not have the luxury of being able to get:
I needed a picture of a GAU. It didn’t matter which GAU. Whether it was an M61 Vulcan or if it was a GAU-8. As long as it was a six-barreled gatling autocannon, it would’ve done the job.
But I just couldn’t get one. And without it, I felt like the comparison fell apart. Later on, while it was in something of an error, after conferring with one of the contributors for the site, we debated whether or not it would’ve been valuable for people on the internet as a whole. They disagreed, and because I thoroughly respect them, their opinion, and considered them a solid view into the audience I wanted to reach, I decided to delete the article entirely. In retrospect, I think this was in error: I do believe the article would’ve been of some value, but the question of to what and whom would not have been so clear. I would like to educate and uplift people, to better and improve them and myself in the process, and therefore, I think it would’ve been crucial, especially since some of the tips I’ve given over the years just in passing to people has significantly helped their aim in the area of what I would’ve been going over:
I was helped by a close friend, and so I can only think that it can be paid forward.
At this point, though, that’s neither here nor there. I had no picture that I could call mine, and I dared not run the risk of upsetting anyone from pulling any example I could easily find on the internet.
An Inner Ring
I’m not going explain inner rings here. If you need an explanation for inner rings, how to be in one, or any of that, I’m going to be honest with you: you have some arrested development that never picked up on the social cue of participation. It’s a real read the room situation.
Except in this case, I have to point out, the room is not in a good state.
On both sides of the issue of copyright and intellectual property, there’s a very simple matter of, it’s more a function of who gets away with it. On the one hand, we have clear cut examples of things that are downright copyright abuse, wherein the laws regarding patents and other ideas are used as a weapon not so much as to really protect an intellectual property as they are to completely remove competition. And on the other, there are plenty of cases where a wide variety of people are taking and using content made by other people to try and make a buck.
There’s a lot of things that while they’re transformative, review, or parody, but what’s really going on is whether or not enough momentum is acquired from the people doing it that if the person in control of the copyright does something, whether or not they really have the leeway is less a legal matter (I mean it is, highly a legal matter but that’s besides the points I’m making) is more of a function of whether or not it will disrupt the inner ring that’s of importance.
We could talk all day about the legal matters, but the simple fact of the matter is that fair use is a matter of case by case, and as people on the internet we have to generally accept that whether or not we even do something that would totally, perfectly, and reasonably be considered fair use in a legal case – or wouldn’t – the real matter is not whether or not it’s allowed to proceed uninterrupted, but whether or not the person doing it ends up within that inner ring of whoever happens to hold the copyright.
If they do, it’s kosher. If they don’t, it’s not, and believe me, the owner of whatever intellectual property it is will have every opportunity to do something about it.
Formative Events
I myself am hung up on the matter specifically because of a rather horrific teacher I had. Through a school project, I used screenshots (taken, literally, with a camera) that were cropped for the sake of the presentation. The teacher demanded I draw, by hand, over each and every screenshot to try and make each picture completely transformative from the original work for something that was little more than a grade school power point project for the computer science class.
Both at the time, and now, I understand that for a variety of reasons, everything I was doing should reasonably have fallen under fair use. I even argued that. Of course, as it goes with arguing teachers, even when one is wholly and completely in the right, it doesn’t necessarily matter: the goal post was continually moved until eventually I gave up on the project completely, and simply accepted that was better for me to get an F on the project than continue wasting my time for any other, slightly better grade.
While in all reality, this was little more than an abuse of power, and I can assure you that, as we all have seemed to run into that professor Umbridge type in our lives, that she was little more than one of those in the making.
Especially because the inner ring was on full display: of the presentations I watched, a significant portion of them had content that was copied from somewhere, in one way shape or form. And I will have to admit, although the teacher did not accomplish her goals in the slightest when it came to the lesson with me (as if I needed to learn Open Office’s equivalent of Power Point, the product she demanded we use), I have to admit that I learned a powerful lesson about the presence of that inner ring.
Some get the pass, others don’t. And whether or not someone is in the right, doesn’t mean you’ll have the resources at the time to actually argue your point.
A Tale of Two Posts
I recently made two different replies on twatter about the subject. One was regarding a person who had gained a significant amount of traction by being non-transformative in the slightest and clipping a wide variety of Gundam shows, and now mecha in general. And the other was about the subject of the West’s beef with Japanese mecha design.
I’m going to shamelessly admit that I know better than using Plato’s whole technique but every now and then when someone’s not going to be remotely constructive, it’s really about the only way to extract value about the subject. I’m mentioning that because, undoubtedly, some of the arguments that the former brought up are probably why more than one person is actually looking at my site near to the time of this writing. I’ll go ahead and make a brief mention of some of the topics I brought up in the questions I asked, but before I delve into that fully because it’s going to consist of slipping back into the subject of the inner ring, I’m going to hold off on that and instead hone in on a very important subject when it comes to those posts.
Holy shit do not fucking post Macross clips in short form anywhere. Do not touch Macross stuff on various platforms. Don’t touch Genesis Climber Mospeadea on various platforms. The reason being that it is important to understand that Harmony Gold is a known copyright troll, and the best way that we can ever reclaim Macross in the West, is to basically let it die.
I was personally pretty fine with someone posting Gundam stuff, but honestly, when I was younger, Gundam wasn’t really my thing. G Gundam caught my interest, and I bought a bunch of model kits when they were available and built probably every one of the Shuffle Alliance with the exception of Bolt Gundam. But what really hooked me was Robotech… And then when I learned where Robotech came from, well, I started to learn about Harmony Gold’s overall copyright trolling.
“But, why Macross specifically?”
You might ask. Well, that has more to do with the second post, which basically covers, in some extreme succinctness, another problem associated with Harmony Gold:
They royally screwed over Battletech when it comes to the Unseen. Even though, as far as Battletech went, they correctly sought consent and proper licensing from the actual creators of Macross to use both Valkyrie and Destroid designs in Battletech, HG pulled the consent meme.
The best case scenario for Macross and Macross related content in the west is for whoever usually is on top of this to get old enough that they forget about it, and whoever the job’s handed off to next to be lazy enough that they don’t do anything about it. The only way that will happen is if they end up having no reason to take any action at all. This is why I feel very strongly about, basically, shutting the hell up about in the West: Fight Club rules until Harmony Gold – or whoever normally deals in this – gives up the ghost.
Things are a little better today than they were about ten years ago, but not much. And the only thing that’ll really quiet stuff down is for Harmony Gold to not have a new copyright mine dig in and troll. I really wish that weren’t the case, but it’s the fact of the matter.
An Outer Ring
There’s another channel similar to the inner ring that relates more to socially acceptable behavior that’s loosely condoned, but is most definitely understood to be completely and entirely regressive. While I mentioned before that there’s certainly the behavior of people that’s more a category of people they find acceptable doing something which would otherwise be unacceptable because of who they are, there’s definitely a channel of a category of actions and behaviors which are most definitely all quite similar, but two of the three is seen to be completely unacceptable, while the third is simply something that people look the other way on.
So let’s knock the two out of the way first, although I’m going to break up the second one into two categories. The first is AI: we know that AI is sampling from a wide number of places without consent and this has gone to the point of litigation, wherein the people creating them wholly admit that they can’t keep these data sets legitimate, and the more learn about the data sets that AI are trained on, well, the more absolutely horrific the prospect of AI becomes. The second, however, is tracing. Artists absolutely despise tracing, but it’s most certainly quietly understood that tracing is… Necessary, even, for various tasks.
There’s more than a few animes that have environments which are most certainly directly referenced and traced. So it’s obvious to say that what artists really despise is their own work being traced. I’m not knocking artists here, this is perfectly understandable. I’m only mentioning it for the sake of being complete and honest in the discussion: no one’s a complete angel, here, and we’re all sinners. How much we sin, and with what intention, is what matters.
…But what about that other category which is most certainly quietly looked past when it comes to digital artists?
Photobashing. A wide number of digital artists who have ‘specialized’ in landscapes have used various techniques of photobashing, and have undoubtedly profited off of it when it comes to using these for actual work, that one has to wonder, significantly, about the overall creative integrity of digital artists as a whole, especially for the period of the 2000s into the early 2010s, especially because I have never, ever, once seen anyone up in arms over the subject even when things like this…
Exist. Most any gamer should be able to recognize the pose – and more importantly, the assault rifle – from Halo. Now, I mentioned landscape artists specifically because that’s where I know, for certain, that a tremendous amount of photobashing has been done, and while I’ll say it’s probably best understood that when it comes to the subject of matters like tracing and so forth, that really is where people take the major issue is probably mostly with character art. That being said, I am most certain that throughout the years, plenty of digital artists have most definitely profited, significantly, off of work that very likely wasn’t theirs, without ever acquiring consent from the people who took the photograph.
Now, am I calling out the behavior? Well.
No, actually, I’m not.
What I am calling out here is the general hypocrisy and the refusal to fully recognize, clarify, and quantify the outer ring. If artists want to be upset over AI, I think at the end of the day, a significant portion of them have to come out and admit that they probably have used techniques that aren’t really much better and have functionally little more creative integrity.
“Ah, but it was at least done by human hand!”
…I mean sure, but then we’re just splitting hairs until we find something that you might find regressive. And if I’m really, really bored, we can go through this Plato style until I’ve asked enough questions that force you to sit down and admit what is functionally plagiarism is, indeed, plagiarism.
Unfortunately, I will say that when it comes to the matter of AI, the fact that photobashing went on for as long as it did is probably a core reason why most of ‘big tech’ feels like it can get away with what it has gotten away with.
And to put a bow on it:
I’m going to go ahead and say that I’ve had my own work claimed by other people in the past. I’ve been stripped from the credits of different things because I didn’t agree with the direction stuff was going in. And when I’ve been among the best of the best, I’ve had other people talk about the time period after as if I didn’t exist – like I wasn’t the one leading the charge in a specific regime. And at this stage, I feel like I’ve been humbled enough by life to say that, in many ways, that’s just what life is.
But for all that, I think it’s really crucial to understand that there’s a ‘time and a place’ for certain things, and that if you’re say, continually clipping out parts of a series and posting it on social media over and over and over and over again, sooner or later you’re going to ruin the ability for anyone to clip out parts of something whether or not it falls under fair use.
Although, I really shouldn’t even bother wasting my breath, because it’s obvious the people who do this have already considered it, and for most people, it’s better to climb up the ladder and then pull it up on everyone else before they can get to it, even if they’re not really even interested in that regressive of a climb.
