Good news: my Female Armor Bingo (and its rhetoric spinoff) got featured on a few popular geek sites, including Kotaku and MarySue.
Bad news: no-one asked me about it.
I absolutely appreciate the rise of my work into virality and am very satisfied with how all the articles I found are well-worded and supportive of my cause, but… once I found out last night, I had to personally contact every one of them and ask to edit the contents, so that they won’t feature full-res version of my graphics and would link back to the bingos on tumblr and deviantArt.
All the editors were super cool about it and adhered to my requests (sadly, two of the articles got deleted altogether, which was the least preferred option to me personally).
I’m grateful that everyone apologized, but the fact that I had to ask for this apology was very unprofessional of them.
All of that trouble could be avoided, though, if they contacted me before publishing the articles.
Let’s make it clear why I wasn’t 100% okay with the way things got done before my intervention:
- My graphics were published in full resolution – for everyone to take without the need of visiting my original tumblr (1, 2) or deviantart (1, 2) posts.
That both steals traffic from my sites and leads to random people downloading and reposting my work without credit (FYI: on tumblr the only acceptable form of credit is reblogging the original post, not reposting it as a completely new thread!).
- Even though pretty much every article properly credited me as the creator (and linked to my dA profile), many did not link directly to where the original versions of the bingo cards can be found (why it is bad, see above).
- Every site that reported on my bingos gets ad revenue for the views. Considering my images were used in their entirety as part of the articles, it constituted to these sites making money off my graphics.
As far as I’m familiar with copyright law (and as professional artist I need to know the basics), putting my whole full-res graphics in there does not count as quotation or fair use. That’s why I asked every site to replace the images with low-res thumbnails and/or with direct links to where they can be originally found.
As much as I’m grateful the contacted sites changed the articles to suit my requests (even though apparently I won’t see a dollar for the time my full-res work WAS featured), I have to say some peculiar arguments were raised as explanation to using my graphics…
Suggestions that some “news value” makes my work fair use or that I, by putting credit on those bingo cards, encourage sharing of the images around the internet (I do, but not for commercial purposes!). Someone else tried to put the onus on me by claiming I didn’t left any usage instructions, as if “contact the writer and respect copyright” rule didn’t go without saying.
Inspired by that, I will write down usage instructions for my Bingo cards in a separate post and will update the original posts with it as well.
PS: I’m surprised that I haven’t heard of this coverage from my followers. Chances are, some of the newest ones found out about BABD from Kotaku but never mentioned it. Of course you guys aren’t required to message me about how you found me (that would be incovenience to everyone, including me). It’s just unfortunate with such big chances, no-one asked me “Have you seen what MarySue wrote about your bingo?”
Edit: Post Scriptum edited for clarity. Sorry for wording it as if I blamed you guys for not telling me. I really don’t. Plus some few minor wording edits. That’s what I get for writing just before sleep.
