e621 'closed down permanently' after legal threats

In what way is anyone 'worse off'? How are they missing a 'wonderful resource'? The art is still out there in the original artists' websites, most of whom are on Furaffinity. What's lost is a site that reposted work, usually without permission or the knowledge of the artists; what's gained is that maybe now people will actually visit the official websites and bring them some welcome traffic. Plus, maybe visitors will poke around and find the work that wasn't allowed on e621 because of the DNP lists.

Seems like it was personal, you should read journal comments more carefully

Rakuen don't start, if you are going to do this again, try putting actual substance to your arguments.

Actually is it just me or does this sound a lot like the 4chan drama a couple years back? For those of you who don't know what happened was that furries kept posting copyrighted images without the artists approval, so the artists threatened to sue and either they'd have to either remove the images, pay damages or take down the site and drama broke out.

Yes, cause rolling image boards like 4chan or /furi/ which actually DO post child porn and various pictures of animal crualty spiced with some little bit of dismembering and guro can go on free.

Now people bitch about drawn art and tomorrow we can "heil" back the thought police where you get to court for what you were "supposedly" thinking. I wonder where the fuck this so called democracy is going.

That's immaterial. The point is that it was drawn art, it had nothing to do with actual people being harmed. Lots of people play Call of Duty for example, but they aren't charged with murder because it is not real. If there is no real action taking place then there is nothing to punish.

I would say that it was a bastion of pirated art distribution, since most of the time art was posted without permission. That's quite a different thing than art being freely distributed, since that phrase suggests that it was done with the artists' knowledge or permission.

If it wasn't available, then there was probably a reason. Regardless of why, no one outside of the artist or the owner of the original work has the right to post any art or story to the net just because people can't find it anywhere. Demand does not override the rights of the creators/owners.

" AND another humans are a type of animal and have human quality's... wait! isn't that the definition of anthropomorphic? If that's so then isn't humans anthro? <-mind blown!"

1) I think everyone 'blows their own mind' because I think everyone egotistically likes the way they think of things over everyone else

2) Humans are not anthropomorphic because the definition of anthropomorphic contains that the human qualities have to be attributed to a non-human entity, and I've looked at pretty much every dictionary I can if you have another one that claims otherwise I'd like to see the link.

Yes. Furaffinity, Art Spots and Deviant Art, just to name a couple. As these are archives, they have direct links to their contributors.

It doesn't matter if they posted the source. You can't just copy and reproduce something somewhere and then claim "Oh, it's okay, I gave credit to the author/artist/creator."

Basically, it's not going to court because the legal fees would be prohibitive. In fact, the sites were likely counting on there be no major complaints from artists for that very same reason. No one wants to enter into an expensive court battle; even a short bout would still cost heavily. Essentially, this comes down to a game of 'chicken', and one side blinked.

The Hadley case doesn't actually set up a legal precedent because Hadley pleaded guilty as part of a plea deal; as such, there would still be room for a stronger legal defense on the same charge, if not for the Dwight Whorley case. I think the Whorley conviction, which had no such plea deal and stood up to appeals (and which I note was denied further appeal by the Supreme Court earlier this year) will actually stand as the legal precedent.

Actually, it doesn't help that your friend IK decided to email the site, and the datacenter owners, too, telling them that e621 has kiddie porn.

Including DMCA notices that were not his standing, apparently.

His reasons are the ones that Arc cites, not Dragoneer, and DMCA claims have been filed against e621 for years.

This is Insane Kangaroo's moment ;) Don't give it to someone else.

That e621 truly is a furry website: "Leaving the fandom brb."

And so, the piracy continues.

That I was right to use quote marks in the title of this article. :-)

Not to freak out and panic over nothing...

Personally, you're not going to convince me of that because of the way someone looks that they you know everything they are going to do. My high school friend was a 5'4" scrawny squeaky voiced pipsqueak who dressed in business casual on a regular basis and was a 4.0 student throughout highschool and his first 3 years of college.

He never finished his 4th year, in the summer prior to his senior year (still living at his mother's house) he snapped, bashed his mom's head with a clock when she was on the floor he went to the kitchen, got a knife, came back and stabbed her to death. He promptly turned himself in and plead guilty to 2nd degree murder.

The whole community was caught off gaurd... why? Because their family APPEARED perfect to the community. But really, my friend was a closet homosexual, he never even told me, he never told anyone until after a year in the slammer. But with the way his voice carried, his mother pushed him to try and speak deeper, tried to get him to be more perfect for their appearence, and because of such, he snapped.

The morales of this story: Sometimes its those putting up a 'perfect' appearence that should be the worry, and never try and forcefully change someone from who they are or you will probably drive them fucking crazy.

I mean think of it this way: If you're a furry, maybe people would think you're less crazy if you'd stop wearing fursuits.

Actually, people don't go around dressing like police officers every day because... it's illegal. Surprise!

I am a statistics whore, so I know that 99.9% of the time that when someone makes up a statistic they use 99.9% it's made up.

Why? Because when people show them examples they'll go "Well see I didn't say 100%".

Pretty much it's as close as you can come to 100% without being responsible for the exceptions.

I however, as a statistics whore, would actually like to see hard data.

My hypothesis is it might be somewhere in the 50 to 80 range (half pessimistically to 4/5s optimistically) of the time. Because if the artist was known it was probably tagged for archiving purposes. However, if the artist had past problems with the site, or if the artist simply wasn't known I'm sure they wouldn't be tagged. Which I'm sure even just the artist being unknown is more the .1% of the cases.

Sorry, but it's a pet peeve of mine, I've seen so many crappy statistics. When people use the phrase "Pretty much every/all the time" and interchange it with "99.9% of the time" it's trying to inflate the statement into a scientific context, when really it's just a gut feeling with no scientific basis.

"Glad its coming back. E621 was had the best tagged search engine around when it came to furry. 99.9% of the time it gives credit to the artist and posts a link to their FA or what have you."

That's entirely too high a percentage and giving them entirely more credit than they deserve. But regardless of how good their search engine may have been, it was still pirating art (or at the least, allowing art to be pirated) without obtaining permission from the majority of the artists it was leeching from.

"People are far too sensitive to people posting their art. As an artist myself I understand that whatever I post to the net, is going to get downloaded and reposted. So long as they give me credit, who cares? All it does is advertise my art free of charge."

No, this is more of a case of people being insensitive to anyone else's needs other than their own, specifically a website and its patrons whose only interest was in putting up as much art as they could get their hands on without concern or regard for the artists. If you, as an artist, intentionally post your art there, that is entirely your choice; but no one has the right to be making that choice for me or anyone else. The idea that they're giving me free advertising is a false idea. See my comments elsewhere on this page concerning that; I'll decide where, when and how to advertise my work and in what context.

"Even still, people always need a reason to complain and will continue to complain over something so trivial. So have fun."

There is nothing trivial whatsoever about people infringing upon anyone else's copyrights, which is why most artists are going to complain when it happens. If you really believe that it's trivial, then you really aren't very knowledgeable on the subject and haven't yet been properly impacted by it. Anyone who thinks it's a trivial concern is once again dissing the artists.

"I thought artists WANTED their stuff to be viewed."

They do. That's why they post it to archives and to their own websites. That's not a license for it to be freely reposted or reprinted elsewhere.

"i don't understand all this "view but don't download or share" crap... it makes no sense! do they want to NOT be popular?"

Popularity is entirely a different matter from having their work viewed.

Think of it along the lines of them building a prototype for a new car and wanting to display it in a car show: they want you to see it, but they don't want you to suddenly drive away with it to another car show in another town so that you can display it there without you first telling them what you're doing -- or checking to see if they WANT to display in that town and not through some other venue.

"as well, unless they have their furry characters registered at the copyright and trademark offices for legal protection, i doubt they can claim "copyright infringement" and use the DMCA Takedown clause for stuff that's not copyrighted."

All artistic works, whether a painting, a cartoon, a song, a poem, a fursuit design, a dance step or a novel are all automatically copyrighted upon completion. You raise a good point concerning lawsuits, however; here's a snippet from the official U S Copyright website:

When is my work protected?

Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.

Do I have to register with your office to be protected?

No. In general, registration is voluntary. Copyright exists from the moment the work is created. You will have to register, however, if you wish to bring a lawsuit for infringement of a U.S. work.

Why should I register my work if copyright protection is automatic?

Registration is recommended for a number of reasons. Many choose to register their works because they wish to have the facts of their copyright on the public record and have a certificate of registration. Registered works may be eligible for statutory damages and attorney's fees in successful litigation. Finally, if registration occurs within 5 years of publication, it is considered prima facie evidence in a court of law.

Basically, it means that, although you can bring a lawsuit against any infringer at any time, having those copyrights registered is going to simplify matters greatly.

But, it still REPRESENTS the concept, the idea, the desire and the fetish. Child porn is child porn no matter how you disguise it! Young under age humans, creatures, anthro's, cartoons, etc. It still supports the concept and format of what it's about CHILD PORN.

While that may be true in a few cases, despite some of the more poorly written laws that can punish the same for fake child porn as real child porn and hence dissolve the distinction between the two for an amoral person, this still seems to over-generalize and makes assumptions about those that look at child porn.

Why does it seem like people assume all people that look at child porn are so fundamentally and entirely different than people that look at other porn? It is like some kind of dehumanizing of those that are too different, almost as bad of a caricature in some cases as picturing criminals as black-cloaked, moustache twirling villains. Does every person who has an interest in rape porn go out and rape someone? Or does every married man that looks at vanilla porn go out and cheat on their wife given the chance? Why are people with paedophilia assumed to be the only fetish that cannot have self-control, a sense of the boundary between fantasy and reality, and hence must have no free will to live a moral life?

Viewers of any kind of porn can go too far, violating consent to fulfil their desires, and of course should be punished for their actions upon a victim. But many viewers of various kind of porn don't go too far, and are not representable by those that cause the real problems. You can find some fake child porn viewers stating their own case where they know doing anything to a real child is immoral, regardless of punishment, etc., and hence would not even consider bringing down the barrier between fantasy and reality. But you may have to look hard, as such people often get treated exactly the same as those without self-control or morals, giving a strong disincentive to even discussing such a position. And potentially, this is a reminder to paedophiles that people don't care if they switch from fake child porn to real children, because it is all bad and that is more important than actually trying to stop the molesting of real children.

Sometimes it seems like those that rally against paedophilia have ulterior motives than trying to effectively stop molestation of children, thinking that they have more important, grander goals to champion via such problems, and, to me, that is almost as sick of an idea as those that want to molest the children.

Where is the guarantee that they're satisfied simply by looking at fictionally drawn pictures? A person who loves steak is not going to be satisfied by looking at a picture of a steak.