User blog comment:Damesukekun/Song Translating and Mistranslating/@comment-25648422-20180314104931/@comment-34997488-20180314161902

Long time lurker here. I've done a little research on this topic so I wanted to chip in. (Sorry if this looks odd, the wiki isn't letting me post right now.)

I'm afraid I don't believe the problem is what the money will be spent on or that they have other content -- only that they’re doing it attached to their translations. (As you say, that very quote is from one of their translation videos' descriptions, plus they self describe their channel as 'mostly translations' on the donation page.) A large number of artists surely would greatly object to seeing a donation link on something that is not fair use and they didn’t give permission for. Regardless of if the person says “It’s not actually for this. I don’t monetise.”

Furthermore, donations are considered a form of monetisation, just the same as ads. This is software licence related but the concept of non-commercial use for licenced materials is the same and the moderator comments put it very well: https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/435764-free-for-non-commercial-use-license-and-donations/. On the Japanese side I've also seen a number of artists simply say the words “金が発生する” which means “money occurs” (Correct me if I’m wrong there Damesukekun, my Japanese is still very poor.) not specifically “ads” or “donations” just anything that would make money occur by utilising their works. In the end, it's up to those artists to decide if it is ok and give permission, but Kuroaky/Ti Pai doesn't ask -- and such is the core problem.

Apologies for the extremely long passage... I partly just wanted to jump in and ask while the topic is being mentioned. Damesukekun, it might not be the right place, but is it possible for you to add something about monetisation to the page if you have the time? With the internet making it so easy, illegal monetisation seems to be becoming more of a problem in the community lately. I mean no hate to the people who do since it seems to be mostly ignorance of the rules or the language barrier, but it’s becoming very troublesome (Especially all the drama it creates). The MMD crowd has people with patreons whilst using no commercial usage models too for example.