Forums / Maintenance / Suggest Ideas

It's a hassle having to type a permission every time art is going to be uploaded to this site. Most of your typical image uploaders just image dump all the cool and lewd stuff that they could find. Some of the better examples of image uploaders out there upload images with the username of the artist attached to it so it's sourced in a way, but it doesn't exactly make up for the fact that image uploaders don't really ask permission because it's tedious, especially if they're going to upload dozens of images a week. A considerable number of artists would consider this stealing; KYM just gets away with it at borderline because it has a policy to remove art asap once the artist tells the site to knock it off -- if ever the artist finds out there art even ended up here.

So what am I suggesting?

The general idea is to inform artists when their work is featured on KYM, so they can either be happy about it since their work is being seen by more people or ask the uploaders to remove their content from the image gallery.

How this'll work is the bot will send a friendly comment informing the artist that their art has been uploaded to KYM on the page where the art was taken from. The comment will be sent the moment an image with a DeviantArt source in the notes is uploaded into a KYM gallery.

The site in mind is DeviantArt since I think most of the art KYM gets is from there.

The benefits of having a bot is that it builds the artists' trust on the site; it's safe to say that an artist's mood is better when they're informed about their art being uploaded than them finding out themselves.
Furthermore, a practically omnipresent bot whose comments appear in multiple art pages will be noticeable to regular DeviantArt lurkers, thus giving KYM a presence outside the main site.

An example of such a bot

Example of Bot in action

The bot above has left approximately 30k comments informing artists that their work has been featured, which is a lot.
The bot above is also created via Java, so it shouldn't be too expensive for a seasoned software designer.

Thoughts on this?

From a moralistic perspective, KYM really should get express permission before uploading anything. For a human, this would be impossible. We have over one million uploads of fanart, photography, screenshots, and edits that would each require the consent of the creator. Even a perfectly programmed bot would be hard-pressed to handle this. Adding to this, a lot of content from 4chan/2chan and other imageboards or obscure websites is untraceable. Even if every single image on KYM was appropriately sourced and credited (which will never happen ever), we'd be breaching this policy somehow, somewhere.

Adding to this, much of KYM's content, notably exploitables, creates the issue of defining original content. If a user edits a piece of copyrighted art and re-uploads in to KYM, who owns that art?

And that's just images. It's directly against YouTube's policy to mass upload and embed their videos the way we do. Sites like Pixiv and DeviantArt usually dislike (or outright forbid) doing exactly what we're doing all the time. It's just unrealistic to create policy for this on KYM; we'd never be able to manage it successfully.

For now (and historically) KYM tends to run under the policy that we're doing harmless, unbiased documentation, and shouldn't need to actively seek permission from artists or creators to upload their works. As long as stuff is appropriately credited (which we learned is as important as tagging ), there should be no issue. We're blessed to be in a position where we don't have to deal with copyright and creative commons very often – lets keep it that way.

Even in extreme cases, we still have the KYM Office of Cease and Desist Records, which usually deals with content that contains sensitive or personal information, and is removed for privacy reasons.

In direct response to your "bot" idea: I cannot fathom how difficult it would be to make a bot like this. Having it able to navigate through DeviantArt, follow Danbooru sources, use Pixiv, inform Tumblr users, and respond to Twitter artists would be nigh impossible. It would be a nice touch, sure, but a bot like that works better for sites like Equestria Daily for three reasons:

• Nearly all of their content is fanart or comics
• Nearly all of said fanart is sourced
• Nearly all of said sources are DeviantArt

If you want a good example of how diverse and sometimes impossible it gets to source images, try the Ellen Baker gallery. It's definitely not the largest, but spans so many different websites and formats that it would be difficult to even try notifying all the artists.

If people think it's worth a try, though, hey why not?

Please don't let "harmless, unbiased documentation" become ironic. Please.