Talk: MikuMikuDance

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Updates to the producers copyrights

Since I added stuff based on my knowledge of models from Daz I also added some further stuff on fanart in general. I think thats done, anyone is allowed to modify it further as usual. The scenario with MMD somewhat puzzles me because looking around, in many cases the producers are claiming copyright but they don't seem to actually have a grounds for copyright in some cases. This is a difficult scenario. I don't support the thieves and rules breakers because of its still morally wrong and I know how Japan's fanart system works from my experience many years ago (they just DON'T steal in Japan, trust me on that one legal grounds or not, you just don't). One-Winged Hawk 08:12, May 18, 2011 (UTC)

Okay, I had one more thing to note and thats sometimes guidelines are laid down by model producers in Daz to stop the users breaking the rules. So I guess the same applies to MMD. If you comply by the producers request you avoid misusing the model on legal grounds. One-Winged Hawk 08:25, May 18, 2011 (UTC)

Ethics in Japan is basically respect for one. You can pay homage by featuring characters using your own efforts, unless they explicitly tell you that you can't. As an example, it is why there are no written rules against doujinshi, because there is tolerate for it; it is also where new faces come from.

Bottom line: Unless they tell you that you can't, you can do whatever you want within legal limits. O Herman 08:47, May 18, 2011 (UTC)

I know, when I had my bad experience before it was with the Beyblade fandom. There was a MASSIVE fallout with the Japanese fans, basically someone uploaded an entire comic produced by a popular Japanese comic artist who had made many fancomics. The Japanese artist in questionwas upset because that was against her work. There are also fanart laws in Japan to protect their work internationally, I'm trying to find a way of putting that on the page but the best I came up with was to file it under "fanart" (see page). It all makes this difficult.

But the trouble is at the same time, fanartists don't own the copyrights on various materials they use in their work. However, the studios awlays tend to turn a blind eye to fanartists anyway as its alienates and upsets your fans and is really the best method of aquiring a fandom is to just let the fans get on with what they do. Unless they do something like factory mass produce stuff without premission, their not going to interfer with their fandom at all. One-Winged Hawk 08:55, May 18, 2011 (UTC)

Argh... Realised I repeated myself and had to tweak it. Okay, NOW its cool for editing further. I have a spell checker I pull in sometimes, but it doesn't pick up things like that. @_@ One-Winged Hawk 09:05, May 18, 2011 (UTC)

The most confusing fact is that MMD model creators do not claim copyrights on the Vocaloid characters but on the model structure itself, and they have the right to do this under Berne Convention as long as the Vocaloid distributors are tolerant to the secondary use of the Vocaloid characters. With the language barrier, overseas fans do not fully understand the copyright situation and they think Vocaloids are totally copyright-free. I'm contacting one of the MMD creators and asking for advice about this matter. Damesukekun 15:21, May 18, 2011 (UTC)

Ah, thanks for the technical terms, I'd forgotten what those are. I've spoken to Bunai and tomorrow I'm going to try and pull a MMD wikia into this to help get information set up. We're only a general Voclaoid wikia so we have to cram a lot of things into X amount of space and MMD isn't part of the Vocaloid software. Honestly though, right now ANYTHING to help sort this out is worth it. One-Winged Hawk 20:04, May 18, 2011 (UTC)

I contacted one of the MMD model creators and he gave me the usage outline.
1. HiguchiM, the MMD platform author, does not own any MMD models.
2. The default models were created by Animasa, and the creator permits the edit and redistribution in a written document explicitly.
3. HiguchiM does not give guarantee to the the use of fanmade models. Only the default ones are guaranteed.
4. The tacit rule among MMD creators is this. If a model author announces that he/she approves the edit and redistribution, you can do; if he/she does not announce, you may not do. In other words, if a author says nothing about the secondary processing, it means NO. You can do only what a creator says yes. Unfortunately, the rule above is not in the form of written document so I'm afraid overseas users cannot catch the point. Damesukekun 05:52, May 19, 2011 (UTC)

Well, its not much but its enough to begin with. I'm getting hold of the two english MMD wikias today and leaving a message for someone from them to make contact with us. We'll have to sort this out one way or another. Honestly, a lot of the problems in the overseas sector is caused by a handful of people anyway, the majority 'get it'. One-Winged Hawk 06:05, May 19, 2011 (UTC)

Argh, I'm so useless at explaining, feel free to further edit what I've written everyone. One-Winged Hawk 06:31, May 19, 2011 (UTC)

I noticed almost all the infringing people (and uncontrolled translators/redistributors/reprinters) are from North America. The American fans just outnumber the fans from the other part of the world, but I think Fair Use Code and Creative Commons are partly responsible. The North American (US and Canada) copyright code is very different from that of the other countries. Fair Use approves the wider range of secondary use that may not be permitted in other countries. Crypton and other Vocaloid distributors hold the license that is similar to Creative Commons, so US and Canada fans may have less reluctance to "violate" the Japanese copyright code. Of course many North American fans behave respectfully to Japanese creators but we may have to consider the difference and educate them first. Damesukekun 15:09, May 19, 2011 (UTC)

I nmaintain ignorance is a universal thing, so we have to bare that in mind. however, America has collectively the largest Vocaloid fan following (this is why Crypton is hitting America with Miku). thus it is somewhat natural for this to occur. The fair use thing is both a love and hate, however, if it comes from Japan it generally complies with Japan's law as a rule of a thumb.

BTW I'm trying to keep myself fairly tight on this one because really, especially in some fandoms, because at one stage when I was first on the internet, I found you didn't want to be the only non-American fan in a fandom community. One-Winged Hawk 17:39, May 19, 2011 (UTC)

Oh, thank you but don't worry, I'm a well-known translator and contributor both in Japanese and Western Vocaloid fandom and thankfully they have the ear to listen to me now. Damesukekun 23:04, May 19, 2011 (UTC)

So long as there are people talking and trying to sort things out, it will get somewhere.

I witnessed a hige fallout in the Beyblade fandom between Japanese and overseas fans back when the original series ran, it was I think 2004 it happened. A act of similair nature, back then, a Japanese businessman calling himself "Beholder" tried to help repair the damage dealt. Some of us understood... But a lot of the overseas who didn't were the American fans, but generally back then there was a lot more American fans especially as half the world wasn't yet plugged into the internet so to speak. The fair use issue came up then, that was the hardest thing to explain is that you just CAN'T steal art because its pretty.

I know when this incident happened, it was over a fan comic being put on the net by one of the fanartists, a REALLY popular one. The rage spread like wildfire and every forum for Beyblade got targeted, the fanartists demanded all fanart be removed from the Beyblade fandom in the Overseas fandoms and if we did not comply the forums and sites were blacklisted. 2 of the 4 forums (ironically none of these 4 exist anymore anyway) complied with the request to remove fanmade, the other 2 did not, a 3rd didn't comply but one of the mods spent several hours removing fanart anywhere becaus they were disgusted with the reaction. I've seen how stubborn to understand *some* of us can be, some even didn't care and further more, some really insulted the Japanese fanartists. Once everyone realised it was wrong, most retracted their fanart avatars and sigs to comply with the request. Beholder never acted as translator though, he was just a messenager... But the Japanese fanartists had already pretty much made up their mind they didn't want to talk to us or hear what we had to say.

Stupid thing was, most of the time, if people asked they were given premission to use the fanart by the artists anyway. Many artists stopped arting Beyblade related art, so in the end, it hurt everyone and those tested the fanartists patience did much damage. If any fandom gets to this stage it can kill a fandom on the internet very quickly. I'd like this to b as correct as possible... i hate to say it, but the more black and white (very wrong and very right) something sounds the easier some find it to understand. Shades of grey in an argument tend to just led to confusions. >_<' One-Winged Hawk 23:40, May 19, 2011 (UTC)

I don't think the cultural conflict goes so bad in the Vocaloid fandom. The Vocaloid synthesis software is a commercial product, but Crypton and most creators share the recognition that Vocaloid music, illustration and other related fanarts are under Creative Commons. I can't blame North American fans, for not a few Japanese fans process or sometimes abuse the original works, too and they have shown the bad example. Fortunately Crypton spreads its business to North America so I hope the company takes lead about this matter. Damesukekun 15:12, May 20, 2011 (UTC)

Did a clean up of the page and seperated some parts more so it was more easier to disect. Also removed some confusing information (I'm REALLY bad at explaining stuff sometimes, sorry), and made it so there was less reaptition. One-Winged Hawk 08:33, May 21, 2011 (UTC)

Finished, ready for further editing. I was aiming to do this yesturday but I wasn't in the mood for personnel reasons. One-Winged Hawk 08:57, May 21, 2011 (UTC)

sorry for the quick insert, but it suddenly occured we need to mention Japanese producers might not be great at English. As logical as that seems, its best noted on the page anyway as a reminder. One-Winged Hawk 09:22, May 21, 2011 (UTC)

Gonna be asleep after this comment. Does it seem like a better idea to move all the legal jargon to a separate page? Trying to explain all of it basically took over the meaning of what having MMD is about and it is about fun with models and unintentionally promoting a Vocaloid company, basically it pushed a lot of the basic information downward. lol

Some suggestions, MMD Model Terms of Service / Model TOS / MikuMikuDance: Things to Know / Mythbusters: MMD -- Bunai82 ^(talk) 11:57, May 21, 2011 (UTC)

Might be worth creating page tabs like with the figurines page, I don't want to seperate them too much since their kind of needed on the page. The only other thing would be to buff up the rest of the stuff. I think half the problem is, we haven't really had much call previously to make the page bigger then it was, now we're suddenly having to explain every detail of the copyright due too many idiots out there. With MMD being complex, its never going to be easy to deal with this. If we do seperate them regardless, we got to keep this one very clear. One-Winged Hawk 21:55, May 21, 2011 (UTC)

Yeah that! XD I keep forgetting you can do something like that. Basically it feels like *slap slap slap* here's the fun part *slap* -- Bunai82 ^(talk) 04:05, May 22, 2011 (UTC)

MMD Producer List?

A new member to facebook group mentioned that many model infringements are caused by young people who have no clue where they got the model or by people who simply don't know who made it. She suggested that there be a list that includes pictures of said models and the producers specific requests. I was wondering if such pages would be possible on the wikia. Daniru17 17:54, May 19, 2011 (UTC)

We're trying to get a MMD wikia sorted to handle this since we're sort of focused at Vocaloid itself... Its sort of like how we mention UTAU but don't deal with UTAU. :-/ One-Winged Hawk 19:32, May 19, 2011 (UTC)

Ah at least there is something happening since there are attempts at mmd wikia pages but they don't appear to stay together. Hopefully since it'll be run by the same people it'll be able to stay together like the Utau wikia. Daniru17 01:25, May 20, 2011 (UTC)

Question about 100% models

Am I right in establishing that models came with the magazine and are not sold seperate?

I don't want to mention you-know-who (I don't want to keep mentioning the MMD headache troll), but you-know-who is now claiming the model producers are breaking the rules charging for models, but if the models came with the magazine your buying the magazine with the model free your still not buying the model as such. .

Again this sterns from my Daz|Studio days, as I used to buy magazines for Daz|studio stuff, this is how I got the software Bryce and a Daz|studio dragon model. They were free with the magazine. I'm asking if this is correct because if the models are supplied free with a magazine then by all means their "safe" within the realms of copyright even still and I can retweak the page for this. Its just something that crossed my mind in a VO forum response today related to their rants about you-know-who. :-/ One-Winged Hawk 09:09, May 25, 2011 (UTC)

Ah let me rephrase this, is the model included in the magazine with no extra charges for it or being sold as a seperate item to the suscribers. Oh wait thats not a better rephrasing. Okay, let me just ask with as much detail HOW does one get the models detail for detail. This is important because I need to adress an issue possibly on how this is being done on the page and not knowing how its being passed around sort of makes a difference to a lump of text written on the page that may need correcting.

Please forgive me, my mild dyslexia is kicking me hard today, not in the spelling sector, in the gramma and explaination... though I do wish it was doing spelling because thats simple to correct. -_-'One-Winged Hawk 20:57, May 25, 2011 (UTC)

Alright, someone on VO confirmed the details, which is great! :-D One-Winged Hawk 21:48, May 26, 2011 (UTC)