I think I may have previously asked
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about how WikiFur relates to copylefted media, but I don’t think that the topic of how the furry fandom makes use of copyleft/copycenter licenses hasn’t been fully explored yet.
I mean, sure, you already have the following freely-licensed media:
And also, the vast majority of text on WikiFur is licensed under the GNU FDL (which is also used by Wikipedia).
However, I wonder about other forms of furry media expression, such as sound and video. While the former hasn’t historically possessed an overbearing influence within the furry fandom (visual content reigns supreme), video and 2D/3D animation (via YouTube and other Flash video hosting services) is fast becoming an apparent, accessible and useful means for furry media expression.
The problems which I see with this rise of Internet-based furry video and animation are the following:
- User licensing for the content uploaded to YouTube (currently the majority repository for furry video), say, if the user wants to license it under cc-by-sa-3.0, isn’t as explicit or standardized as on Flickr.
- The user who makes the video may use clippings or samples from non-free, proprietary-licensed media (furry or non-), such as images, video, 3D models or sound, thus putting them into legal jeopardy.
- The Flash video formats (FLV and SWF) are proprietary and legally restricted (until only recently) to the Adobe Flash player, while the Ogg Theora/Vorbis and SVG formats, which are open and freely-licensed formats, are in a very tiny minority in comparison to the usage frequency of FLV/SWF, Windows Media, DivX and QuickTime. Theora doesn’t even make a blip on the furry radar (not even on WikiFur, hence why almost all videos on WikiFur are either embedded or linked from elsewhere), AFAIK.
Thus, for Internet video posting, sharing and editing, the furry fandom is already in a deep, three-layer heap of legal shite.
(PS: For the record, I currently follow the “GNU school” in that I don’t consider any license that restricts Derivative or Commercial usage to be a copyleft license, hence the no-show of cc-by-nc and cc-by-nd in the above list of licenses).
BTW,
, Has WikiFur considered the idea of a “FurryMedia Commons” akin to the WikiMedia Commons as a repository for freely-licensed furry media that anybody can use in their own videos? This, of course, should probably only happen when WikiFur moves off to its own servers, whenever that may occur.
Yeah, I’d like to see a lot more use of free CC licenses out there, but there’s a lack of knowledge generally about copyright, licensing and fair use. Of course, that’s partly because much of the fandom is very young and has not had to deal with these issues professionally.
I was actually planning to do a panel on this topic (and other IP issues) at AC, but there were issues with scheduling, and the popularity – or lack thereof – of the existing copyright panel does not lead me to believe it would be that worthwhile. It’d probably be better to write it up and post links to it in a few conspicuous places.
And, of course, there is the provision of services. The issue here is that such services cost time and money. Timduru’s server has a lot, but even that has its limits, and while our current plants do involve a shared image library, it will not be intended just for free content.
That doesn’t mean you can’t upload free content there, though; you can do that now. We just don’t have plans to make it a key advertised feature of WikiFur. It’s more to ease the use and tracking of images across multiple instances of WikiFur. A lot of our images are fair use/assumed license commissioned images.
Of course, making one big archive isn’t necessary the best approach. My furry photos are all CC-BY-SA. If people want to make video slideshows out of that, they’re welcome, and perhaps we could make something to specifically track that kind of content through links. That avoids the cost of hosting our own library. Perhaps we could even thumbnail them.
Yeah, I’ve tried to get some furry media released under a free license. It’s hard to get them to do so willingly.
As for a FurryMedia Commons, you know you can just put furry media on Commons itself, right?
Ahh, that works too, at least for freely-licensed images. I edited the Furry section of WMC just now to create two new categories for “furry cartoons” (for drawings) and “furry 3D drawings” (the latter of which only consists currently of the Big Buck Bunny category). At least for organization purposes.
Still, it needs more furry video, both at WikiFur and WMC’s Furry category.