nmaster64 wrote:
Let's look at this:
1) A multimillion dollar company releases a product, while viewable for free, alongside highly overpriced merchandising.
2) A fan creates a piece of art, not claiming the source to be his own, but simply as a compliment to it, for free for all to enjoy. What most don't realize is these fanworks serve as great ads to the show, and create more fans, selling more merchandise.
This is the first of my justifications. which has to do with
law.
The fanwork is, in almost all cases, illegal. A cursory glance at copyright law will tell you this. If your work is illegal, and someone else just comes up and steals it, well, I don't think you have much of a case for ownership. Sure, you might own the edits and some garnish. You own zilch compared to the original source.
So guess what? Newflash! The only person who suffers here is the original fanwork creator who slaved for hours over a fanwork all for nothing.
This is a good start for my second justification, which is
effort.
If you think fanwanking is difficult, the effort differential between fanwanking and original creation is about as large as fanwanking and someone ripping off that wankery.
Seriously, try it sometime. I have, and it's one reason why I view AMVs this way. Your mileage may vary.
There's no "ripping off" involved in AMV creation, because nobody claims they actually made the anime or music that they're using. Credit is given where credit is due.
This is where things become less objective. The third justification I have comes from morals.
I view attribution as only right if the creation is, for the most part, original. If you have secured the rights to transform or reuse someone else's work, then I think attribution is only right if you substantially build upon that.
Therefore, I'll slap my name (and my copyright, which is often expressed as
this or
this) on large programs I write, or complex 3D animations that I create from scratch. Perhaps small portions of those scenes may have come from appropriately-licensed or public domain libraries of models or textures, or (in the case of programs) appropriately-licensed or public-domain code.
Those things take significant mental effort to create, and as I am legally entitled to attribution and copyright, I'll take it. So you could say that it's a threshold defined by effort and law.
The common retort to all this involves relativity. Well, yes, this
is obviously all relative. What I think is a complex 3D animation would probably be peanuts to Pixar or PDI. What I believe to be a programming masterpiece might be trivial to Donald Knuth. But that's been what I've written all along:
I find it highly amusing when people try to give AMVs such protection.
I think it's a dumb idea.
You clearly do not, and that is why
I do not attempt to make it some absolute measure. (That doesn't stop me from publicly saying that I think it's a dumb idea, though.)
Anyway, for me, AMVs -- and other minor works -- simply do not pass that threshold; I don't care what level of complexity you take them to. Obviously, they fail the legal requirement; and, as I wrote above, much of the work is already done for you. Even if you spend months slaving over five seconds of an effect, or months plotting out some elaborate storyline, it's nothing compared to the training and labor required to create that same thing from scratch. I don't think it matters whether or not you claim that you created the anime or music; the video is still trivial enough that claiming ownership over the edits (e.g. requiring proper attribution) is
wrong.
So, to summarize:
I think enforced attribution for AMV editors is wrong, and I think that combined with the blatant illegality of AMVs makes it really, really funny when AMV creators seek punishment for people who claim some AMV as their own.
I guess it goes without saying that I don't care if someone takes one or all of my fanvids and claims it as their own.
