Rule 3 Addendum - Translations of Others' Works

[icekid]

I 100% want to tell people I speak American.

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My favorite joke is telling people im bilingual cause i speak English AND American.

 

[FeatheredSerpent]

If the rules don't allow plagiarizing someone else's fanfiction without permission, why should an official work passed through a translation program get a pass?

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Again with the "spirit of plagiarism", huh?

Reposting* someone else fanfiction w/o permission is not welcomed because it's generally a dick move. Less so then actual plagiarism but still. There are extenuating circumstances and edge cases of preservation and such that make it kinda OK, but it's not about that.
*-'cause that's what you're talking about, plagiarizing would be to pretend it was your work to begin with, and so always done w/o permission.

The change AFAIKT is from the system where inappropriately posted works can be taken down on demand from rightful owner to a system where the poster themself need to prove there's no foul play before posting anything.

Presumption of guilt unless proven otherwise is never a good thing to have around in any form, even if it makes the life of forum staff easier and that's my gripe with the situation.

The line between a language and a dialect is complete arbitrary nonsense.

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Yes, mutual intelligibility is such an arbitrary concept, not at all a binary "you understand each other? y/n". [/sarcasm]

I don't remember the exact numbers but it comes down to number of shared lexems and phonems.
Dialects share almost all.
British, North American and Australian English speakers understand each other fine most of the time, barring quirks of local slang.
Same with metropole Spanish and South American dialects.

Languages of same family share a lot.
Like Germanic Family that includes, ironically, Yiddish (linguistic drift can be weird sometimes).

Now, many of the "Dialects of Chinese" have less in common between each other than French and Dutch.
But they're still called dialects. Because Party says so.

 

[Spelloyal]

Too bad, I was actually following a translation here. I hope the guy who translates things continues on another site.

 

[Jason Wu]

Too bad, I was actually following a translation here. I hope the guy who translates things continues on another site.

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Same. I like using as few sites as possible but it is what it is

 

[da3monh0st3d]

A majorty of *all* fanfiction novels suck. It's *fanfiction*

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A significant proportion, if not necessarily a majority (I haven't bothered to run numbers), of published works also do.

People translating it into another language without permission is kind of a dick move

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I'm not sure why enabling the sharing of a story with those with whom it would otherwise be impossible to share it isn't laudable.

It may be commendable to also credit it, if one changes it very little. Or in general, artists sharing their inspirations or sources is good.

which specifies that your work should be protected (i.e., writing fiction should be afforded legal protection that would save you from economic loss).

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You missed a post of mine that would explain the priority that should be.

Economic protectionism for rent-seeking on a product instead of compensating the labor of the artist is not desirable. Subsidies, benefits and such for cultural works are a thing, too.

None of those are mutually exclusive with patronage of the labor, donations or a basic citizen's income (which is almost required to actually comply with the phrasing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with the current system).

Consequently, I don't see why "culture" is sacrosanct in a static, archived sort of way; as a living document, it should allow for the possibility of revision (not in a despotic / tyrant manner, but rather for edge cases where someone genuinely makes a mistake such as in scientific observation or where one's rights would be infringed on).

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Culture should be an append-only log. What is relevant changes as new appends obsolete prior things, as with the alpha research you mentioned, but the original research has not been memory holed & made impossible to find.

(Consider that append-only formats do not at all prevent modification and updating, however they do also allow for going back and seeing previous versions if one wants to.)

What you instead promote is the right to permanently and retroactively destroy parts of it, which is an entirely different consideration from obsoleting parts of it.

By the way, "cultural genocide" is one of those things with a bunch of UN discussion & validation around it that came up within those last 80 years, so I'm not exactly sure where you're pulling that I missed the last 80 years. Unfortunately I'm not at liberty to truly dig into that and the various UN declarations (and their disregard by their signatories or the issues with the actual declarations too) because that is very much a Rule 8 discussion.

 

[SashaVhler]

they tell the traditions of others fanfiction

 

[Ambitious]

The legal status of fanfics makes actually suing people over it quite difficult considering that many of them are only legal thanks to the US exemption. I don't think anyone even knows what happens legally to a fanfic's copyright if the source they are primarily based on goes public domain.

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US law is pretty clear on this actually, at least if I'm interpreting it correctly: the fanfic's copyright, which applies and has always applied to only the parts that were not in the original work, continues to apply to those parts until it expires on its own.

According to wikipedia there's a settled case where the reverse happened - season 3 of a tv show went public domain, while seasons 1 and 2 were still under copyright. Because the show's characters and setting were covered by the copyright of the episode where they were introduced, generally in season 1, they were all still under copyright.

Or for the reverse, just look at the case of Mickey Mouse: the character himself is public domain as of a year or so ago because his first appearance in a cartoon went public domain, but more recent movies with him are still under copyright.

 

[zmikez]

Novelupdates is a shitshow nowadays, fam.

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Doesn't change that people are blatantly profiteering off of pirated works. $20 says one of their first responses will be "still available on my patreon"

It also just reinforces my point. People doing translations have garbo'd the hell out of a site dedicated to it but they're not making enough money so they start spam-posting it where it doesn't belong.

---not pointed at you, the rest is just a mini-rant---

I honestly thought it was bad enough that authors were putting clearly SFW in the NSFW sections just because it got more traffic. This is obviously false advertisement which is bad enough but the translations...

The forum is NSFW Creative Writing it's not NSFW Writing, or NSFW Novels, it's NSFW Creative Writing.

I wouldn't mind there being an actual location for the stuff but it literally does not belong in a Creative writing forum.

Presumption of guilt unless proven otherwise is never a good thing to have around in any form, even if it makes the life of forum staff easier and that's my gripe with the situation.

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I actually laughed at this. Just imagining someone trying to use this argument is actually funny. Lets just look at max sentences for trusting people

"Trust me bro, I'm 21." he says while trying to buy alcohol from you.
up to $5000 fine, 1 year in prison

"Don't worry, I got permission to drive it." With a screwdriver in the ignition and wires dangling next to their knees
$10,000 find (or more), up to 5 years in prison

"Trust me bro, they're just aspirin." while holding a prescription bottle.
up to $5,000,000 fine, 40 years in prison

"Trust me bro, they don't mind" while having copyrighted material and selling *cough* sorry, I meant getting donations for translations
up to $150,000 per willful infringement (read as chapter)

It's ok to be naive and gullible, but you gotta protect yourself.

Some of these people are 100 chapters in and if it's knowing and willful.... $15,000,000 is NOT something most are willing to bet on, because accessory to copyright infringement suffers effectively the same penalty. Not only that but courts can order you to cease all actions that facilitate the infringement which includes keeping QQ operational. Even the best case scenario of paying the minimum amount for literally JUST THE ONE GUY that has posted like 400+ chapters? You're looking at nearly 2mil in legal expenses.

Also, make no mistake, hosting copyrighted material on your website and having links pointing to their patreon? That definitely falls under facilitating.

 

[Dragon Bob]

Yes, mutual intelligibility is such an arbitrary concept, not at all a binary "you understand each other? y/n". [/sarcasm]

I don't remember the exact numbers but it comes down to number of shared lexems and phonems.
Dialects share almost all.
British, North American and Australian English speakers understand each other fine most of the time, barring quirks of local slang.
Same with metropole Spanish and South American dialects.

Languages of same family share a lot.
Like Germanic Family that includes, ironically, Yiddish (linguistic drift can be weird sometimes).

Now, many of the "Dialects of Chinese" have less in common between each other than French and Dutch.
But they're still called dialects. Because Party says so.

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So while you are correct that dialects should be defined by mutual intelligibility the reality is much more complicated.
The truth of the matter is prior to the rise of nationalism which led to a push to standardize languages, most languages existed on a spectrum. Where you spoke French, understood the French of everyone in the villages around you, but would struggle to understand French from the other side of the country. Or on the opposite end, places like Italy where each city state had it's own language which all 'became' Italian after unification.
Ultimately what's a language and what's a dialect is mostly defined by national borders.

 

[Euphemism]

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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Uh, these people are profiting off of posting translations to QQ somehow that they can't easily pivot just because QQ locked their threads? Are they somehow injecting ads into the QQ threads? They don't already have a Patreon where the people giving them money are already subscribed? They're not already crossposting from a translation site that's already harvesting money from ads or paywalled chapters?

Who are these translators making money off of QQ that are suddenly going to plummet into debt?!

 

[da3monh0st3d]

Wasn't the case with Chinese/Hanzi that the writing system was specifically created as a common non-spoken language mostly orthogonal to the spoken languages?

 

[Skrattybones]

I'm glad to see this.

I reported one of these a little while back because it seemed obvious to me that the poster was just copying and pasting it wholesale from a translation site like NovelUpdates and wasn't their own translation work. I'd read the first chapter and went, "I'm sure I recognize this specific punctuation and formatting," and sure enough, it was word for word a translation from a group from back in like 2020.

I'm not especially bothered by the idea that the translation itself is theft -- if it ain't available in your language of choice, then that's that. But I was bothered by the idea that people were stealing the actual translation work. It already existed, for free, so.. I guess it was for internet points on here?

 

[Jason Wu]

I guess it was for internet points on here?

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What are internet points?

 

[Thatonesungod]

What are internet points?

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The points you earn for doing well at internet. If you get enough, you can trade them in for grass.

 

[Bludflag]

which is almost required to actually comply with the phrasing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with the current system

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If you're bringing things down to an economic, legal level (which your post seems to attempt throughout) then you should probably understand that the universal declaration of human rights is considered to be a document to strive for, not immediately put into motion. Saying its signatories don't abide by it is simply silly.

Aside from that, posting two 16-minute videos as a response is, how should I put this, a bit too much? I'm sorry, but I'm not obligated to engage in over 30 minutes of video content to maybe engage with what you have to say—especially as it doesn't really concern this thread in particular and I don't find discussions like this very exciting. There's no particular impetus for me to check it out.

As far as I'm concerned, the disagreements seem to mostly boil down to perspective—a completely ideological one versus one that considers matters of practicality. In theory, it would be nice if everyone got to post whatever they wanted under freedom of expression, but consider that if someone MTLs 10+ average foreign fics and updates them at once, they're effectively hogging the first page (especially if you try something like sort by last threadmarked) and if anything gets reported, spurious copyrighted material could produce a legal response within days (therefore existing reports might get pushed back because this would require a quick response and a thorough investigation). You sometimes have to consider execution as well.

You also have to consider the possibility of copyright trolling or people reposting the same thing someone else worked for and essentially e-begging. None of these options are pretty and spell a difficult day for mods; it's simply not worth it. Especially since you can just go and engage with the source material on another site. You aren't even being told you can't discuss it here, just not to blatantly disregard site rules on illegal content (that, if you recall, you consented to by joining the forum).

Ideally, forum communities would be self-regulated by people knowing better, but I think this thread and its necessity already showed why this isn't particularly feasible and why sometimes the mod team has to put its foot down; personally, I think the major forums are quite good on this front. Most social media has a TOS that can update at random with pretty much no notification to the user and to their potential loss. When you look at SB or QQ, they extend the courtesy of notifying you, opening a thread for discussion / clarification, and potential revision. Twitter or Adobe will try their best to not tell you they want to scam your ass.

 

[da3monh0st3d]

@Bludflag I have not denied nor dismissed the issue of legal liability for QQ in this thread.

It is indeed a problem that is beyond QQ's ability to fix and the only option (that doesn't require serious setup changes) is to cope in whatever way mitigates the liability.

The spammy UI interaction could be handled by modification to the UI and filtering/grouping features. That wouldn't handle the liability aspect though.

 

[KinKrow]

The change AFAIKT is from the system where inappropriately posted works can be taken down on demand from rightful owner to a system where the poster themself need to prove there's no foul play before posting anything.

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Neat idea, unfortunately you've completely dodged the basic fact that you're copying someone else's work and profiting off it without permission.

Presumption of guilt unless proven otherwise is never a good thing to have around in any form, even if it makes the life of forum staff easier and that's my gripe with the situation.

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'Presumption of guilt'
'Makes the life of forum staff easier'

If only QQ wasn't based in countries where DMC takedowns have occured for shittier reasons than ripping someone's story (piracy), translating it through a program (no personal work), and profitting off of it without paying anything to the original person (plagiarism).

If you view preventing potential legal shitshows as 'simply making the staff's lives easier', then you aren't arguing your point from anything but the most disingenuous position I can imagine.

 

[zmikez]

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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Giving this argument additional context.

What are things that were ok in the past that are outlawed in most civilized societies?
Child Labor
Public Executions
Duels (fancy public executions with an unknown outcome!)
animal fighting
beating your kids
debt imprisonment
child marriage
forced labor
medical experimentation


Starving artists are a thing because sentiments like this make it near impossible for people to make a living off of art as a primary income.

This goes right into the self-interest portion as well. What if Toriyama or Oda decided that they couldn't make money in a market because people would just steal their work. No DBZ, no One piece. I can't help but wonder how many amazing works have died before they've even started due to sentiments like this.

 

[seeing_octarine]

I'm not especially bothered by the idea that the translation itself is theft -- if it ain't available in your language of choice, then that's that.

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Translating something is not stealing. Theft deprives the owner of possession of something.

But I was bothered by the idea that people were stealing the actual translation work.

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That's not theft either. Passing someone else's translation off as one's own would be plagiarism.

and profitting off of it without paying anything to the original person (plagiarism).

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Plagiarism is taking credit for someone else's work or otherwise passing it off as your own when it is not. Merely profiting off someone else's work is not that, and is hence not plagiarism.

Fuck's sake, this isn't hard you guys.

Yes, I know I'm being pedantic as fuck, but this is the sort of discussion where that's actually important.

 

[SmokeRichards]

Fanfiction exists in a legal grayspace that no one really wants to take to court because no one wants to risk being wrong. The publishers don't really want to pursue fanfic because if they lose, suddenly it's open season on their IP, and the fanfic writers don't really have the money, and even if they did, they wouldn't want to settle the issue because if they're wrong it all goes into the drain.

The courts really don't want to deal with the issue because it can be best described as a legal clusterfuck where basically everyone is going to be unhappy no matter what they decide. The courts really don't want to torch a significant chunk of all the writing humanity has ever produced, and they really don't want to mess with IP law either. It's the kind of issue that the bench would really prefer the legislature address.

De jure, it might be legal, it might not be. De facto, no one is going to send you a C&D as long as you aren't actually making money off of it unless your name is Games Workship, and even then, G-dubs doesn't really bother with written stuff.

I can't really think of any legal argument that would apply for translations. It's not derivative. There is no gray area.

On a site level, I can't think of any value that these translations bring to the site. Most of them are low-effort slop.

On a personal level, if mister McGoo with his shitty google translate isn't shitting up the front page, that means I get more time on the front page for readers to notice my stories. As I put in much more effort than mister McGoo, this seems very reasonable.

On an artistic level, people with the writing chops to add that magic that proper prose has to a translation are going to be writing fics, not translating them. At least not unless someone is paying them a pretty dime. These works might sound okay in their native language, but parsing ESL translations or approximate equivalents is not what I consider an enjoyable reading experience, so most of them aren't even doing a good job. Most writers might be pretty bad, but if your putting in the effort it takes to actually write anything, then I feel it's pretty fair to have a platform, even if no one wants to read you. The effort translators put in wouldn't be anywere near the effort it takes to write even if the translation is a decent one.

TLDR:

Good fucking riddance. Stay winning mods. Don't know why we're talking about UN in the thread, but this seems like a sound choice to reduce litigation risk that really shouldn't've been there in the first place.

 

[FeatheredSerpent]

The truth of the matter is prior to the rise of nationalism which led to a push to standardize languages, most languages existed on a spectrum. Where you spoke French, understood the French of everyone in the villages around you, but would struggle to understand French from the other side of the country. Or on the opposite end, places like Italy where each city state had it's own language which all 'became' Italian after unification.

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Only it wasn't French language. It wasn't French people.
It was Normann, Aquitaine, Brittany, Gascon, what-have-you.
The linguistical convergence I've mentioned earlier was exactly the shakedown process of those very different languages and dialects of western-germanic family into coherent whole that we now call French that was pushed by growing social and economical ties that demanded communicating with people from afar (by medieval standards).
And it all started and ended long before nations and nationalism as we understand them now became a thing.

In China the spread of universal phonetics independent ideographic script threw a spanner into this convergence as both traders rulers and philosophers could communicate with each other just fine without bothering to accustom themselves to unfamiliar speech. The results of this are seen today when speaking Cantonese do absolute jack in helping you understand Mandarin.

Summarizing: dialects my ass.

Ultimately what's a language and what's a dialect is mostly defined by national borders.

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Belgium exist.

I actually laughed at this…That definitely falls under facilitating.

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I… would refrain from saying what I think about most of that… that. As to not violate Rule 1 of this forum.
Only point you to Terms and Rules section that contain all those cute little waivers a.k.a. "staff is not responsible for whatever shite users are up to" and "all users agree to use this site in compliance with law, if not then it's on them".
There shouldn't be any reason for standard "on-demand deletion of copyrighted shit" to not be enough.

consider that if someone MTLs 10+ average foreign fics and updates them at once, they're effectively hogging the first page (especially if you try something like sort by last threadmarked)

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And how, dare I ask, inserting the need for OG author approval prevent exactly the same shit but now with OG author approval?
If anything it's an indicator that better content filter system might be needed.

Neat idea, unfortunately you've completely dodged the basic fact that you're copying someone else's work and profiting off it without permission.

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Did I? I mean that would be illegal— therefore violates terms and rules— therefore a perfectly valid reason to shot down the thread, hit the scammer with a boot permban to the face and cooperate with any legal authority working against that person, no?

If only QQ wasn't based in countries where DMC takedowns have occured for shittier reasons

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Well, mayhaps switching host to a more sane place is in order then?