Copyright Art, Artists, & More (Patreon)

If you're watching on twitter we ran into a bit of a situation where a random (very, very upset) user was accusing us of stealing art, ripping out the watermark from the original author, and setting it as a display picture. 

Of course, none of those things are true. In fact, that's a silly amount of work for the character being cited. 

Regardless, though, it did reiterate our need to keep official art as our default display art, and do our best to handle keeping things cool with artists.

Yesterday, I launched a button to allow users to report the primary image as being non-official, which makes it easy for power users to go through and fix. 

Today, there is now a source recommendation available which reports to power users. This should allow art to be appropriately tagged.

Keeping Things Cool With Artists

We're in a weird spot with a lot of different possible problems. At any point copyright content holders can request removal of content. While our Waifus may be able to survive a DMCA claim under fair use thanks to the trash button \ voting system and comments allowing critique we're not so confident that it would survive anything else.

We're taking the route of being the easiest to get along with and trying to add value to the original creator(s) when fan art does make it on the website.

• the gallery is an important and widely used feature
• fanart looks amazing
• fanart may be all that is available for certain characters if they are ignored by the author (side bitches)

The Korean DMCA

Earlier this week I posted a news article about TopToonPlus requesting a DMCA which I definitely did not agree with. For a series to be DMCA'd when it would have a positive impact on the popularity of a series and potentially the site itself seems silly. Also: they didn't DMCA the Waifu. Just the series. I think we got caught up in some really awful copyright scanner that just assumed and scanned for it and lumped us in with bad actors. Needless to say: not a fan.

Artist Accounts

Today I also rolled out another small feature to allow users to request an artist permission under the account page. From this, I'll gauge interest in having artists themselves upload their work under Waifus and promote it to the top of the gallery. If enough people do it, we can make this happen.

Detecting Disallowed Images

There is a nice way we can detect images that artists do not want uploaded: using image hashing algorithms to detect similarity. Similar to how SauceNao does it we can detect and block uploads of specific art. This introduces two huge issues though: 

1. We need to process all the images we currently have to make a hash
2. The artist needs to give us the rights to store the image anyway
3. It's outside the scope of the project by a pretty huge margin

Final Thoughts

I think at the end of the day the only thing we can do is hope that if an artist, or their rabid fans, stumble upon the site that they don't get super upset before looking at the resources we have to contact us. We make it really easy and hopefully we can a good relationship both in the states and overseas.