Mangapug.Com - A community for manga/anime artists.

xxWillowxx wrote:I noticed that you (the admin or whoever runs this site) has enabled people to buy our artwork, I'm getting the impression that we do not get a share of the profit, so I think that either you or whoever runs the site needs to ask permission first or give the artists their share of the cash for the hard work they put into their art. the business card one really annoys me because whoever buys that is using someone else's artwork as their logo, which would be the same as copyright infringement if there is no creative commons license

First, thanks for the feedback.

I'll handle the easy question first - the business card. I hope most people would agree that giving credit to the artist/author would be a common courtesy... regardless of being compelled by the law.The purpose of the business card is for people to show off their own work and provide a link to more work. It is *supposed* to have the name of the creator on there, like the other items... with my assumption being that only the creator would buy a business card with their name on it. It looks broke though as all the items have the same username. The business card has been hidden until this is fixed.

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The second part is more complicated.

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By virtue of uploading work to the internet, permission is inherently being given for the work to be copied and duplicated electronically. In it's most basic form, that's how the internet works. Everything you look at on the internet is copied to your computer prior to being displayed, and stays there in a cache. Internet service providers do the same thing to keep pages loading quickly. A webpage can not be loaded unless copies are made.

Talking about physical reproduction is were things get complicated. The printing company we link to probably makes a profit, but I have no idea how much. MangaPug makes about $1 for any item purchased from them. Our thought on offering reproduction was that users could reach a wider audience, and we'd have an income to sustain/improve the site. I'm open for discussion on what would be the best solution.

I'm inclined towards a policy similar to wikipedia's. This requires a Creative Commons license as you suggest.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_use_policy#Adding_images

Comments are more than welcome.

Copying our images on to our computer is not the same as copying them onto prints, we do that by choice. But I looked closer at the images and saw that you did put our copyrights on there which helps give us more credit. So that's good

Just a thought:
How many of you think it will be better if only the person who uploaded the product can see the choice of buying the prints?
It would be like Photobucket or any other online albums, just to buy your own prints.

This link has temporarily been completely removed. I don't want to get rid of the option completely, because I do think it's a nice feature.

So, here's the idea of where to go:
1) The user who uploaded the picture will always be able to purchase their own work
2) You'll have the option of releasing all work under Creative Commons, at which point others will also see the "Buy This" link.

This will take some programming changes... we'll let you know when it's working again.