• The site has now migrated to Xenforo 2. If you see any issues with the forum operation, please post them in the feedback thread.
  • An addendum to Rule 3 regarding fan-translated works of things such as Web Novels has been made. Please see here for details.
  • Due to issues with external spam filters, QQ is currently unable to send any mail to Microsoft E-mail addresses. This includes any account at live.com, hotmail.com or msn.com. Signing up to the forum with one of these addresses will result in your verification E-mail never arriving. For best results, please use a different E-mail provider for your QQ address.
  • For prospective new members, a word of warning: don't use common names like Dennis, Simon, or Kenny if you decide to create an account. Spammers have used them all before you and gotten those names flagged in the anti-spam databases. Your account registration will be rejected because of it.
  • Since it has happened MULTIPLE times now, I want to be very clear about this. You do not get to abandon an account and create a new one. You do not get to pass an account to someone else and create a new one. If you do so anyway, you will be banned for creating sockpuppets.
  • Due to the actions of particularly persistent spammers and trolls, we will be banning disposable email addresses from today onward.
  • The rules regarding NSFW links have been updated. See here for details.

Rule 3 Addendum - Translations of Others' Works

magic9mushroom said:
I see these kinds of arguments everywhere these days and they make my skin crawl.

Free speech is the principle that if A wants to say/write something, and B wants to listen to/read it, C has no right to intervene. Disregarding that principle is censorship. Censorship is bad for several reasons:

-it's a restraint of trade which causes deadweight loss, and the deadweight loss can be extremely large for information because the cost of transmitting it is generally much less than the value of having it
-democracy is of far less use if the populace is ignorant or misled; a populace that does not know what is going on cannot judge its rulers effectively
-and most generally, the longer the list of banned things is, the less humans can flourish, the more work it is to know all of them, and the more power priests lawyers can arrogate to themselves by knowing it.

There are some cases in which free speech causes large-enough problems that censorship is the least-bad option. It's still censorship, though, and you should never forget that.
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QQ does not operate on Free Speech principles. There's certain topics, such as current politics, that we just flatly do not allow. Any argument made based on Free Speech and what constitutes censorship is kind of pointless here. While we do allow a lot of things that many other forums don't, and we prefer not to restrict things without a good reason, that doesn't actually make this is a Free Speech website.

That's nothing against Free Speech as a concept; it's a concept that I rather like. It's just that it's not a concept that applies to QQ. QQ is first and foremost, for posting stories. Especially, but not limited to, porn. Any speech that gets in the way of posting and discussing stories and porn in a reasonably civil, legal, and ethical manner, is gonna get the boot here. This isn't anything new, and the fact that you seem to need to be reminded of it regularly is pretty exasperating.

Just because we try to be benevolent, doesn't mean we're not a dictatorship. Accusing us of being a dictatorship, when we're quite open about that and never pretended otherwise, is quite pointless.
Path to Somewhere said:
Out of interest, what happens if translators write a fanfic, just in a different language? That should be fine, though it means extra work.
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If you're the original author, then getting permission from yourself is very easy, yes. Lol.
 
Selias said:
Ah, but people who subscribe to Patreon aren't paying for the author's fanfiction; they're paying to get early access, to vote on what they write, and/or to support their original works.
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The access still feels like a gray line legally, the participatory & interactive part might make for a better argument on its legitimacy within the current system.

Support for the labor of the commentary itself also, but I think that varies a lot by places.
 
magic9mushroom said:
You are confusing "plagiarism" and "copyright infringement". <snip>
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Eh, I'm replying to a chain of posts that from what I can tell started with AztecCroc using the word "plagiarism". The original justification for this policy was more based on the moral right whose (imperfect) manifestation in law is copyright, so that's what I'm basing my arguments on. Precise definitions of "plagiarism" aren't really the point, and my core arguments haven't even used that word.
da3monh0st3d said:
That's like an author ordering all their books burned (even private copies) and stories/works memory holed because they changed to minds or want to rewrite and make new sales out of that (or some other inane reason).
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"Once you sell a copy of your work, what happens to that copy is out of your hands, except that they're not allowed to use your copy to make more copies" is pretty well established in copyright law; called the First Sale Doctrine in the US (and possibly other common law jurisdictions, not sure). Posting a translation on a different forum is pretty clearly in the "use your copy to make more copies" category.

And if you lot are going to turn this into a general "should copyright exist" argument, I'm pretty sure this isn't the place for that.
 
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Thank god, translated chinese fics gives me a deep rage. I was hoping that the admins or mods would ban this kind of things, there is already WN for those things, QQ didn't need those.

99.9 percent of them are badly written fics anyways, it works in WN because it's a Chinese app/site and majority of them had those kind of taste when it comes to fanfic.
 
da3monh0st3d said:
The access still feels like a gray line legally, the participatory & interactive part might make for a better argument on its legitimacy within the current system.

Support for the labor of the commentary itself also, but I think that varies a lot by places.
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Oh, it absolutely is. I'm just giving an example about the types of arguments that you could make. Not every author is J.K. Rowling or Stephanie Meyer, with Scrooge McDuck vaults full of money to burn on uncertain lawsuits.
 
BlueBerryExtreme11Zero said:
Thank god, translated chinese fics gives me a deep rage. I was hoping that the admins or mods would ban this kind of things, there is already WN for those things, QQ didn't need those.

99.9 percent of them are badly written fics anyways, it works in WN because it's a Chinese app/site and majority of them had those kind of taste when it comes to fanfic.
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My guy, I would avoid casting stones from your glass house. If your post Is an indication of your command of the English language, then you're really in no place to talk about anyone else's writing quality.
 
Ambitious said:
"Once you sell a copy of your work, what happens to that copy is out of your hands, except that they're not allowed to use your copy to make more copies"
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Why not? Why is the memorization and retelling of the stories to others who will then also memorize and retell it a problem? Why is a built-in kill switch against culture accepted simply because the story was shared by means other than orally in some community hall, public square or around a campfire (for a few common examples)?

Digital copies only replicate a mechanism that long predates copyright and worked just fine. In fact, they've supercharged this mechanism by easing the memorization and sharing step, much like writing originally did for non-creative kinds of information management.

And expectably, there has been a glut of cultural works created & shared. Far more than the monetary incentive (and its myriad pitfalls) ever managed.
 
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Ambitious said:
(Arguing whether something is censorship is fundamentally misunderstanding how words work, namely, words mean what people use them to mean. "Censorship" is generally used for prohibiting a thing from being said by anyone at all.)
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Ooookay, fine, linguistic prescriptivism 101 it is.

Language is a tool that people use to communicate concepts. If people use words to mean different things, then concepts are not communicated accurately, causing unnecessary misunderstandings. In the limit where everyone's definitions were unrelated to everyone else's, no information could be communicated and society would collapse.

In this case, the term "censorship" is a pejorative term for things that cause a specific set of problems. It is useful to have a word that includes all things that are bad in this way, and does not include any things that are not. I have explained why the definition I'm defending is such a useful definition, and it is also the etymological one (a censor is one who decides what others can say). The redefinition you use (which is largely the result of enemy action i.e. would-be censors attempting to evade condemnation) is substantially more arbitrary, and when people use it (as many do) they are failing to apply the negative connotations of the word to things that deserve those negative connotations. Thus, it would be helpful if people stopped using said redefinition and started using the proper one again.
 
I see this as a good thing. I've seen (on other sites) multiple cases of people "translating english to english" as an excuse to steal fics. Primarily webnovel. (that site needs to go)
 
Jason Wu said:
I wonder if this rule can be applied to images cuz I certainly didn't ask the original artist on whether I can post them
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Posting copyrighted images that the poster didn't create without permission or even the merest hint of attribution is certainly rampant. Much more so than posting stories people aren't the author of.
 
Ambitious said:
And if you lot are going to turn this into a general "should copyright exist" argument, I'm pretty sure this isn't the place for that.
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da3monh0st3d said:
Why not? Why is the memorization and retelling of the stories to others who will then also memorize and retell it a problem? Why is a built-in kill switch against culture accepted simply because the story was shared by means other than orally in some community hall, public square or around a campfire (for a few common examples)?
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magic9mushroom said:
In this case, the term "censorship" is a pejorative term for things that cause a specific set of problems.
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Pretty sure these arguments are way too general to be debated in this thread, so I won't.
 
Lamb said:
My guy, I would avoid casting stones from your glass house. If your post Is an indication of your command of the English language, then you're really in no place to talk about anyone else's writing quality.
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What? What's got to do with English Language? It's a fact that majority of Chinese fanfiction novels sucks. I couldn't careless about grammar or whatever, if the plot is good, I would read whether it's Korean, Japanese, English, Chinese, Taiwanese, hell I've read some of Akikan's earliest fics (which is plagiarized from a Chinese fic and I've enjoyed it despite of its horrendous grammar and overreaching storylines.) At the very least Akikan actually learned how to write their own stories. Unlike majority of the translators out there.

It's simply that majority of Chinese fics and those were translated is another plagiarized from another Chinese fic. And the translator is milking the hell out of them. And posting them here.
 
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To add to it, I have a great distaste as to how most 'translators' monetize their 'translations' when most of then are not even edited but ran through Translate and maybe an AI.

This applies to translations of both Fanfics and Original works.

In this case I'd argue that even FanFic translations should not be allowed when there are chapters kept behind the gates of monetized monthly subscriptions or other, similar, pay walls.
 
does this app apply to just original work or FanFiction as well? This is already been discussed. Please just make me the part where this is discussed.
 
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Khalderas said:
To add to it, I have a great distaste as to how most 'translators' monetize their 'translations' when most of then are not even edited but ran through Translate and maybe an AI.

This applies to translations of both Fanfics and Original works.

In this case I'd argue that even FanFic translations should not be allowed when there are chapters kept behind the gates of monetized monthly subscriptions or other, similar, pay walls.
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That's one thing I completely agree with. No monetization of translations, doubly so for translations of originally free (without patreon early access, for example) works.
 
I am deeply upset about the implementation of this add-on to the rules. This doesn't come off as a "in the works" change, but as a targeted, gut reaction to cover the site's ass. I just noticed the notification banner today, did the people most affected by this given a heads up months in advance? You know, because it can take months to hear back from someone, especially in less developed areas.

(The following rant is greatly exaggerated to express how upset I am.)
It's like a gathering of people left their community because their overlords started meddling with their infrastructure (websites). These people share interesting stories in another place (QQ) because they don't have many other places to go.
For some of them who are less fortunate, these stories are essential parts of their lives because the donations they receive can be the difference between stability and homelessness, especially when they have sick family members to care for.
And then they have their metaphorical tongues cut out for sharing too much. (Rant over)

I'm not disagreeing about the morality of it, the Mods are right to act in a way to stifle plagiarism.

I'm angry about the humanitarian side of it. Where was the grace period!? There are translators who depend on the income they get from unofficial translations to care for their families. This is an especially uncertain time for overseas Asian translators right now.

Mods, morally, you are in the right. But are you okay with being the reason some unfortunate person suddenly couldn't afford medicine/food/water anymore? Give several weeks for those who can't comply some breathing room to move on to other sites before shutting them down. That's my complaint.
 
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