Supporting the Rules
Supporting the Rules
alt text: "the state of the animation industry"
"you're pirating that show? don't you wanna support the creators?" "I AM the creator."
"haha the only way I can show future employers my work is to send a link to a bunch of pirated copies of it haha what a nightmare haha"
I watch a lot of "lost media" discussion channels.
There's been a lot of lost media searches where the people looking for the thing suddenly found a crucial hint when someone who worked on the project posted a 2.5 second clip of the thing in question in a video cv / showreel.
Expect a lot of that in the future. Except about media that probably didn't even get released at all in the first place.
"Capitalism is the driver of innovation"
Is this the infinity train guy?
That's Owen Dennis, yeah.
"Keep Circulating the Tapes" of the current era
🎸 BwaaAAaaAAnnnggg 🎸
If pirating even works. Kiana Mai has a similar haha-this-sucks post about how some of her best work is forever locked behind an NDA.
Which is fucking bullshit.
I don't feel much need for a more detailed or formal argument, on that point. I don't need to fly a diagonal flag and declare workers must etc., in order to say, copyright doesn't mean keeping a fucking cartoon secret... forever.
I will say copyright only exists to provide the public with new works. Businesses are entitled to most of the money and some control. Not all. And if you don't want the money, we still get the result, assholes. The art belongs to us. Copyright is only an incentive for there to be more of it. It is our gift to you. It is not an exchange. Give us what is ours, and either take the money or don't.
Except if you actually want to get any of those changes made you'll run into a problem: money is power, and they wield that power to create artificial scarcity in order to make more profits. They also rely on keeping workers poor and disempowered so they can keep them subservient and make them agree to arrangements where they own none of their own work.
The profit motive is directly implicated in this shitty behaviour, and every single time power has been taken from the capitalists it has been because the working class has mobilised and threatened their power, and they have been forced to release their grip a little bit.
You may be right about what copyright should be for in a perfect world, but that doesn't get results. Worker power does.
New works could be paid for without the use of copyright, but the people with the money are scared of that idea.
Copyright only protects the copyright holders from other people getting to play with the thing they own.
Why do they have to pirate their own show?
Animator works on show. Show airs.
Show has no physical DVD/BD version
Show only exists on streaming service or on DRM-locked "buy and own but not really" services.
Show gets pulled from internet because some corporate license expired or some shit like that.
Show no longer exists anywhere other than the corporation's hard drive and pirates' seedboxes.
Animator needs to show their own work as part of a video portfolio to a prospective employer. A scene they made for a well-loved show is great portfolio material.
The corporation ain't sharing. Not until someone sues for the right to get a hard copy of the show they worked on -- Which given how the entire American state does when corporate interests fight any other interest, is something no one animator is willing to do as it'll probably not just drain their finances, BUT has a legitimate chance of fucking over every OTHER animator down the line.
Ergo.
Animator needs to pirate it.In ye olden days, shows often aired only on TV and didn't get VHS releases. But animators would often just. Tape the show they worked on. Off of the telly. With a VCR.
Which in practice is the same thing as what the pirates are doing, creating a local copy of media that is airing, but corporations don't want you to realise that. So. Here we are.
Probably because they worked on one of the many shows that have been pulled from streaming sites lately.
For example: Discovery is basically taking an axe to the shows on HBO Max and recently pulled another 87 shows and movies from it's service.
Im fully with you on the sentiment but realistically any show that this can happen with (is licensed) will have a wikipedia article and ratings and reviews on youtube and everywhere. But yeah for the whole thing you gotta sail the seas.
any show that this can happen with (is licensed) will have a wikipedia article and ratings and reviews on youtube
How is this going to help with employers? I imagine the interview:
Trust me, my work is good. See this Wikipedia article that says that Rotten Tomatoes says it’s good.
The same way sending them the show will help. If your show is that big they can just look it up reviews or clips on YouTube or whatever. I don't think employers want to watch an entire season of someone's work to decide to hire them, but if it's a recognizable show like some of the ones pictured they may not even have to look it up
Notably, if you're an individual animator rather than the show-runner, your contribution to it will be several short scenes scattered across several episodes, and just linking, idk, the wikipedia article or some trailer will not work for showing what you made for the show.
Different industry, but my first game industry project was doomed to fail. I put a lot of work into it before that though and so I stole a copy of the project to have in case I needed to prove work I'd done. I don't know how often animations go under before being released but in the game industry it is a very real concern. Sometimes you have to take things for yourself or they'll be gone forever
please help me understand why the OP OC creator would not be able to provide a prospective employer a link to his own original material from his own data storage cloud.
They don't own the show. The network that bought it owns it. They worked for, or sold the show to the network when it was created. Very few original creators actually own their own media. It's very expensive for animation to be fully produced so a corporation usually has to finance it. And a corporation isn't going to just allow a creator to retain rights if they paid for any part of it.
They don't usually do the drawing and animating on their own machine, for one. They use a workstation owned by their bosses and therefore don't have a copy of the drawings at home.