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Plot Armor whips rear end, actually.
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Nov 16, 2019 16:48
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taichara posted:And it's embarrassing as hell that a game with blatantly stolen copyrighted art for the cover managed to do that. But then I've pointed out the cover's issue a few times to people (it's me, a Gundam 00 fan, spotted that thing a mile away) and gotten crickets; they don't want to hear it, I guess. I've called out multiple authors who invariably spout some mix of "I think the issue is more nuanced than that" and "Hm, you bring up some good points. I'll have to think about this more when I have the time," and then continue to publish art that isn't theirs.
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Nov 16, 2019 17:17
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The audience for RPGs demands large quantities of high quality art. Even for more indie games, a great cover can make or break a game. This is coupled with extremely tight margins to create a situation where unless creators are independently financially stable they aren’t able to get their foot in the door. Now, stock photos are an option, but since RPGs tend to focus on more fantastical themes, this can be difficult to accomplish. Am I saying that stealing art is the right choice to make? No, absolutely not. But I can understand how designers, especially designers without a lot of capital, could be tempted by that option. For the designers out there, in addition to looking into stock photos and stock art, I highly recommend asking artists for access to their second rights catalog. These are works that have been used in other mediums already, and since they’re already been made the artists are much more willing to sell them on the cheap, after all they’ve gotten what they expected for their labor and anything extra is just gravy.
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Nov 16, 2019 18:26
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Meinberg posted:Am I saying that stealing art is the right choice to make? No, absolutely not. But I can understand how designers, especially designers without a lot of capital, could be tempted by that option. I think this highlights how little we value art more than anything else, like if it turned out a person funded a portion of their book off of burglaries they were doing, would it be understandable because tight margins not a lot of capital etc etc?
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Nov 16, 2019 20:32
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Darwinism posted:I think this highlights how little we value art more than anything else, like if it turned out a person funded a portion of their book off of burglaries they were doing, would it be understandable because tight margins not a lot of capital etc etc? Depends on who they’re burgling. Edit: Another core difference is that the artist has already been paid for the work they’ve created and it’s not like stealing it prevents it from being used in the original context. If the choice is between no art and stolen art, no art is still the morally correct thing to do but I just can’t get up the anger to cancel someone over stolen art. Meinberg fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Nov 16, 2019 |
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Nov 16, 2019 20:35
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On one hand: People need money. Let them get money. No ethical consumption, etc. On the other hand: Like... was Fantasy Flight or someone else not hiring? It isn't like the D&D team is very big compared to the other large RPG companies, even if they make more money? Why choose the company headed by Mikey Pearls, Rape Defense Attorney? Do they actually pay more? I wouldn't think so.
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Nov 16, 2019 20:44
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Meinberg posted:Depends on who they’re burgling. Artists, they're stealing from artists. Just going into their homes and stealing poo poo worth roughly what the art they would pay for would cost. Is it still really understandable?
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Nov 16, 2019 20:50
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jakodee posted:On one hand: People need money. Let them get money. No ethical consumption, etc. Getting a regular paid gig in gaming is incredibly difficult. FFG probably wasn't hiring, because they rarely do, and FFG and WOTC are probably the only two games in town in terms of actually giving people regular jobs rather than contract work. Not saying you have to agree getting a job in gaming is worth working under that particular person, but there are very few games in town, with very few positions available.
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Nov 16, 2019 20:52
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Darwinism posted:Artists, they're stealing from artists. Just going into their homes and stealing poo poo worth roughly what the art they would pay for would cost. But that’s not what they’re doing? If anything, they’re stealing the second rights to a work which is sold at a bare fraction of the first rights, but really they’re not even doing that because there’s nothing stopping the artist from continuing to provide second rights. Like, I make games and I’d rather that people don’t pirate them, but if people did because they wouldn’t have ever paid for the game then I feel like it’s less skin off my back than if someone pirated the games and would have paid for them otherwise.
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Nov 16, 2019 21:21
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Meinberg posted:But that’s not what they’re doing? If anything, they’re stealing the second rights to a work which is sold at a bare fraction of the first rights, but really they’re not even doing that because there’s nothing stopping the artist from continuing to provide second rights. Like, I make games and I’d rather that people don’t pirate them, but if people did because they wouldn’t have ever paid for the game then I feel like it’s less skin off my back than if someone pirated the games and would have paid for them otherwise. I mean... if people can just use art without paying for it, why would anyone buy those secondary rights? I'm not trying to be an intense copyright defender here, but you have to see how it's not actually a victimless thing to do, right? e: Similarly, if pirating games is just accepted with the logic of 'well I probably wouldn't have paid for them anyways' it becomes really easy for people who could and might buy them to say 'well it's only fair I don't either.'
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Nov 16, 2019 21:44
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Joe Slowboat posted:I mean... if people can just use art without paying for it, why would anyone buy those secondary rights? I'm not trying to be an intense copyright defender here, but you have to see how it's not actually a victimless thing to do, right? Again, I’d point to it not being the right thing to do but also understandable. Capitalism is a grinding wheel that converts us all to dust and sometimes people gotta do things that aren’t entirely ethical in order to eke out a meagre existence underneath the auspice of its glaring eye.
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Nov 16, 2019 22:21
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Meinberg posted:Again, I’d point to it not being the right thing to do but also understandable. Capitalism is a grinding wheel that converts us all to dust and sometimes people gotta do things that aren’t entirely ethical in order to eke out a meagre existence underneath the auspice of its glaring eye. And who better to take money from than artists? Eat the poor!
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Nov 16, 2019 22:26
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But the artists who are also getting ground to dust and so forth can just get hosed right
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Nov 16, 2019 22:27
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I realize art has value but I'd seriously prefer an ashcan rules-only barebones edition that's priced much more affordably and meant for play. Like, I don't need to see my six hundredth illustration of a Paladin. But I need to pay for it every time I buy a PHB.
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Nov 16, 2019 22:30
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A poor person robbing a bank out of desperation is understandable and I hope they get away with it. A writer stealing work from someone else that may very well be in the same financial situation, for a niche product, is not understandable except that the writer is an rear end in a top hat.
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Nov 16, 2019 22:33
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Meinberg posted:Again, I’d point to it not being the right thing to do but also understandable. Capitalism is a grinding wheel that converts us all to dust and sometimes people gotta do things that aren’t entirely ethical in order to eke out a meagre existence underneath the auspice of its glaring eye. Well, I mean any crime is understandable, in that the criminal has a motive to do it; in general people don't just commit crimes randomly for absolutely no reason. So saying it's understandable... maybe isn't wrong, but also isn't very meaningful. Stealing art certainly isn't something publishers "gotta do", and you're very much minimizing how much art theft hurts artists. It's not just that they're preventing the artists from collecting some minor pittance they would have received for secondary rights; if using art without paying artists is normalized, then that cuts down on paying artists for original work, too. (And even that smaller secondary rights fee is by no means negligible; a lot of artists are scraping by narrowly enough that small payments like that can easily make the difference as to whether or not they're able to pay their bills.) It absolutely does hurt artists' ability to make a living, and it's not something worth sweeping under the rug as a trivial peccadillo that small publishers are forced into by the market.
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Nov 16, 2019 22:33
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I’m also thinking about the difference between publishers and low income, truly independent designers. Like, all of my art is sourced from pixabay, a site with public domain stock art. I run it through some filters on GIMP (which is also free) and slap it into my pdfs which I compile in Scribus (which, again, is free). I’m able to maintain a zero budget chain from creation to publication because i work with the scraps that are available. A downside to this is that I can’t make the games I want to make because the art that I’d need isn’t available on pixabay, which is a restriction that I work around but don’t especially like. But here’s the thing, from a purely financial situation, what I’m doing and what DC did for Plot Armor is identical. The only difference is the ways that we engage with the consent of the artist and existing intellectual property law. Breaking the consent of the artist is absolutely and completely a terrible thing to do and I’m not defending that at all. I am, however, willing to take a shot at IP law which largely exists to allow the powerful to benefit at the expense of the weak. So, again, there is a huge difference between the scales that DC and I are operating on and the scales of even something like Buried Without Ceremony which is largely the operation of one person, but one person with an entrenched presence in the community and enough existing capital to be able to afford the bare minimums of art necessary to run a kickstarter. For some people, especially disabled people, especially queer people, especially people of color (which I should note that I am not), and most especially people with low to no income, that first step of getting one’s foot in the door can seem overwhelming, can seem completely impossible, and in that space of desperation, people make bad decisions.
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Nov 16, 2019 23:09
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Joe Slowboat posted:I mean... if people can just use art without paying for it, why would anyone buy those secondary rights? I'm not trying to be an intense copyright defender here, but you have to see how it's not actually a victimless thing to do, right? Most piracy's kind of a bad analogy here anyway, as whatever the ethical issues of it, pirates are usually downloading for their own use, not to make money. This is more equivalent to someone pirating a RPG work, and then trying to sell it on DTRPG as their own work.
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Nov 16, 2019 23:21
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Meinberg posted:Breaking the consent of the artist is absolutely and completely a terrible thing to do and I’m not defending that at all. Then what exactly is your point? Because your posts—the rest of this post included—very much come across as defending art theft. Are you just making some weird attempt to play devil's advocate? If so, you can stop now; the devil has been sufficiently advocated. Meinberg posted:I am, however, willing to take a shot at IP law which largely exists to allow the powerful to benefit at the expense of the weak. Independent freelance artists are not among "the powerful". Yes, there are some issues with the implementation of IP law—the excessive extensions of copyright terms are of course largely thanks to Disney not wanting Mickey Mouse to fall into the public domain—but the existence of copyright, and the fact that it prevents people from using artists' work without permission, protects the weak as much as the powerful. Meinberg posted:For some people, especially disabled people, especially queer people, especially people of color (which I should note that I am not), and most especially people with low to no income, that first step of getting one’s foot in the door can seem overwhelming, can seem completely impossible, and in that space of desperation, people make bad decisions. Do you not think there are also disabled people, queer people, people of color, and people with low to no income among the artists whose work is being stolen? Why is one group excused for endangering the livelihood of another group that's at least as disadvantaged? Despite your protests to the contrary, repeatedly saying "okay yes it's technically wrong and they shouldn't do it but you can totally see why they did and they didn't really have a lot of choice" very much comes across as defending art theft. If that's not what you intend to do, you might consider a different approach to whatever it is you're trying to say.
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Nov 16, 2019 23:34
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Ultiville posted:Getting a regular paid gig in gaming is incredibly difficult. FFG probably wasn't hiring, because they rarely do, and FFG and WOTC are probably the only two games in town in terms of actually giving people regular jobs rather than contract work. Yeah I know that ttrpg writing market is poo poo, but I didn’t consider that WotC are one of the companies to provide you with maybe an actual salary. I can’t really blame someone for “selling out” to one of the only places that offers financial security, but I can for using that gundam art if there is a person who should have been paid for its use. If some Japanese toy company owns it then steal away, but if an actual human should have got a cut, don’t steal more of a fellow artists labor value than their bosses already are.
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Nov 17, 2019 00:09
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It seems like DC and the Hasbro corporate culture are a terrible match. DC has always been pretty unforgiving and I wonder what they'll say the next time Mearls pops up and people start giving him poo poo. Will they just keep their head down? Hard to see how this could work out well.
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Nov 17, 2019 01:13
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jakodee posted:If some Japanese toy company owns it then steal away, but if an actual human should have got a cut, don’t steal more of a fellow artists labor value than their bosses already are. It's official branded artwork, and I believe it's on the cover of the season 2 DVDs for Gundam 00. It is really dumb and weird to steal that art considering there have to be a lot of mech artists out there that'd be happy to draw something like it for a reasonable cost, but straight up grabbing a picture of a gundam is pretty blatant and bad.
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Nov 17, 2019 01:19
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Ultiville posted:Getting a regular paid gig in gaming is incredibly difficult. FFG probably wasn't hiring, because they rarely do, and FFG and WOTC are probably the only two games in town in terms of actually giving people regular jobs rather than contract work. Anyone have any strong reason to assume the role reports into Mearls, as opposed to being on digital products or Magic or both? Anyone actually asked DC politely if they're aware that the cover art looks like it was derived from the Gundam art? (Related: anyone bothered to notice that the cover is credited to someone else, who might not have told DC the truth?)
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Nov 17, 2019 02:48
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On top of the fact that it's stealing financially, using someone else's art on your product implies that the artist endorses your product in some way. It creates an association without their consent. You have denied the artist the opportunity to decide they object to what's between the covers of your thing and don't want their name associated with it. Stealing from a corporate entity might seem like it's less morally hazardous, but it sure as poo poo is a lot more legally hazardous, and you have to be a real moron to do it. That corporate entity has the werewithal to drag you into court and, when they easily prevail, you will have to hand over all of the money you made on sales, as well as stop selling your thing. And I don't mean all the profit, I mean all the revenue. And when they also show that you knew that you were stealing, you will be subject to punitive damages too. And if you bother to hire your own competent lawyer, your lawyer will correctly tell you to take any settlement offer that corporation makes, which is probably that you stop selling your work and pay them at least tens of thousands of dollars in damages to cover their legal costs. At least. Also you don't get to keep the unsold product, it'll be shredded. And of course, due to the reputation you will have gained as an art thief, you'll definitely destroy any chance you ever had of working for an RPG company or any other publisher. Don't steal from individual artists because it's stealing money, it's stealing their name and personal brand associated with the art, and it has the net effect of reducing pay for artists. And it's illegal. Don't steal art from corporations because it's an insanely risky and stupid thing to do, and it's illegal.
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Nov 17, 2019 03:39
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For the record, when I needed free art for a mech game, it took me about an hour of googling to find some Creative Commons robot pictures.
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Nov 17, 2019 05:19
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Magnusth posted:For the record, when I needed free art for a mech game, it took me about an hour of googling to find some Creative Commons robot pictures. Yeah, there's a bunch of free or nearly-free resources out there for those who care to look - even for commercial products - so there's really no excuse for art theft in the RPG world.
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Nov 17, 2019 16:06
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Falstaff posted:Yeah, there's a bunch of free or nearly-free resources out there for those who care to look - even for commercial products - so there's really no excuse for art theft in the RPG world.
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Nov 17, 2019 16:15
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I mean, capitalism does suck. But c'mon...
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Nov 17, 2019 17:23
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This conversation spun into a really bizarre caricature of itself over something that started with "someone took the official blu-ray box art of an anime, ran it through some photoshop filters, and made it into the cover of their interesting indie mecha RPG".
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Nov 17, 2019 17:52
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Nuns with Guns posted:This conversation spun into a really bizarre caricature of itself over something that started with "someone took the official blu-ray box art of an anime, ran it through some photoshop filters, and made it into the cover of their interesting indie mecha RPG". Thanlis made a good point, actually, that that might not even have been the author's fault; the credited cover artist might have passed it off as their own work without the author knowing it wasn't. (I know I certainly wouldn't have recognized the cover to an anime Blu-ray.) But I wasn't trying to address that specific case at all; I and I think most of the other posters in the last page or so were just talking about art theft in general, and in particular Meinberg's bizarre posts about how we should all have more sympathy for the poor, misunderstood art thieves.
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Nov 17, 2019 18:11
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Jerik posted:the credited cover artist might have passed it off as their own work without the author knowing it wasn't. (I know I certainly wouldn't have recognized the cover to an anime Blu-ray.) If you're writing a game about anime mecha protagonists, this excuse doesn't fly. This isn't even art of spaceships or generic fantasy people or original mech designs, it's official box art from one of the most popular series in the entire world in the niche genre the game is about. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 18:29 on Nov 17, 2019 |
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Nov 17, 2019 18:26
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Best part is they didn't even go for something obscure or relatively unknown, they went for one of Japan's most famous anime properties. 
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Nov 17, 2019 18:26
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Lemon-Lime posted:If you're writing a game about anime mecha protagonists, this excuse doesn't fly. OK, fair enough. I don't know much about the mecha genre and didn't know just how recognizable the copied art was. As I said, I wouldn't have recognized it, but then I'm not trying to write a game about anime mecha protagonists.
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Nov 17, 2019 18:32
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Jerik posted:Thanlis made a good point, actually, that that might not even have been the author's fault; the credited cover artist might have passed it off as their own work without the author knowing it wasn't. (I know I certainly wouldn't have recognized the cover to an anime Blu-ray.) But I wasn't trying to address that specific case at all; I and I think most of the other posters in the last page or so were just talking about art theft in general, and in particular Meinberg's bizarre posts about how we should all have more sympathy for the poor, misunderstood art thieves. I'm well aware of how the discussion reached this dumb point, and I think there are some contexts where decent people convince themselves that the only way their game will get attention is by lifting some nice art without consent or payment. They're probably the very narrow minority of art thieves, who (based on experience) are usually more general fraudsters or cheapskates and probably also stealing other things or trying to churn out garbage on the cheap and make money by sheer volume of trash. The entire argument only exists because someone jumped in about the amount of art theft on the DMsGuild after the Gundam 00 art was brought up and it became about people conflating arguments both in the general trend and a specific case.
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Nov 17, 2019 18:34
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Nuns with Guns posted:The entire argument only exists because someone jumped in about the amount of art theft on the DMsGuild after the Gundam 00 art was brought up and it became about people conflating arguments both in the general trend and a specific case. I'm... not sure who was conflating anything? The mention of one specific example of art theft segued into a discussion of art theft in RPGs in general, but I don't think anyone was conflating the general trends with that one case, and I don't think art theft in RPGs is something off-topic in this thread, even if Meinberg's posts in particular were dumb. But I think that topic has pretty much run its course now anyway.
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Nov 17, 2019 18:46
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Lemon-Lime posted:If you're writing a game about anime mecha protagonists, this excuse doesn't fly. Yes, you can tell how obvious it is because the game won an Ennie and *nobody noticed this*.
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Nov 17, 2019 18:46
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It’s less nobody noticed and more if they litigated that people should start talking about the far worse poo poo the Ennies have ignored involving their winners. The Ennies don’t actually give a gently caress.
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Nov 17, 2019 18:51
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Jerik posted:I'm... not sure who was conflating anything? The mention of one specific example of art theft segued into a discussion of art theft in RPGs in general, but I don't think anyone was conflating the general trends with that one case, and I don't think art theft in RPGs is something off-topic in this thread, even if Meinberg's posts in particular were dumb. But I think that topic has pretty much run its course now anyway. I'm not saying discussing art theft is off topic? Meinberg made a couple of posts about how they can sympathize with people who feel like they have to steal art and then refocused again around their own practices and DungeonCommandr's. This entire post of yours is replying to Meinberg's specific addressing of the Gundam 00 art right here and you start talking in general terms about how art theft hurts independent artists: Jerik posted:Then what exactly is your point? Because your posts—the rest of this post included—very much come across as defending art theft. Are you just making some weird attempt to play devil's advocate? If so, you can stop now; the devil has been sufficiently advocated.
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Nov 17, 2019 19:00
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Nuns with Guns posted:I'm not saying discussing art theft is off topic? Meinberg made a couple of posts about how they can sympathize with people who feel like they have to steal art and then refocused again around their own practices and DungeonCommandr's. This entire post of yours is replying to Meinberg's specific addressing of the Gundam 00 art right here and you start talking in general terms about how art theft hurts independent artists: Meinberg wasn't specifically addressing Gundam 00 art; they were talking in general terms and using it as an example. But whatever; that discussion seems to be over now anyway and I don't see a point in rehashing it again.
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Nov 17, 2019 19:08
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  I don't understand using this as an example of your work unless you just assume no one in the world knows about Gundam 00? I know very little about Gundam but I sure as hell recognize that style of robot face. Did Mikey Zee work on the Bluray cover art and also get permission to use that art for other projects? It just seems so blatant.
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Nov 17, 2019 19:20
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