Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-4698889-20170726130044/@comment-6986530-20170809210750

Here's my thoughts: The ethical line is when you render it redundant to buy someone else's work. When we have wiped manga scans on here, we don't provide the whole manga or the actual text of the manga. When we provide summaries on here, we don't provide the actual prose (at least we won't be if we finish trimming down the stupid character articles which I made a forum about if anyone noticed .) You could make an argument for the image scans but when they're not publically available on websites and trailers they're almost always part of the novels, which you (usually, anyway) buy for the prose and story, not just the art.

You buy an album to listen to the music. We provide the lyrics, the translation, and even a summary of what goes on in it, but you take an extra step providing the actual song. You render it completely unnecessary to buy the original work. You can't get a great feel for how the song sounds just looking at the lyrics. It's when you showcase the pirated song that you make it redundant to buy the album. I hope that all that I'm saying makes sense.

You can make the argument that we're not the ones pirating and uploading the music, we're just linking to where it's been made available so it's fine. The problem is that argument kind of goes out the window for us in particular because several of our wiki members have specifically made PVs and asked them to be the ones linked to on the wiki, or specifically made them to be linked to on the wiki.

And yeah, this is something we should have considered a long time ago because the anon is right, nothing's changed. We should have been looking to similar wikis and following their examples of conduct (the Vocaloid and Putin-P wikis, for example, do not link to pirated song content) rather than waiting for mothy to confirm on an off comment that he doesn't appreciate the piracy.

Personally, I don't think it's a big deal to mothy. And I don't think he's even thinking of Every Album Song Ever when he makes that kind of statement. I recall him some time ago actually praising a fan video of The Letter She Waited For, which was pirated, instead of telling them to take it down immediately--so it might just be the songs from albums he's actively selling that he's thinking of, which to be fair is most of OSS and Trinity, so a lot, but still. He might even just be thinking of it in the context of "I'm gonna be putting them on all Youtube in a PV anyway," which would be cool albeit not too likely.

So with all that in mind, I'm not asking anyone to take their videos down--like, I haven't even done anything with mine yet, and I don't think you're gonna get in trouble if you don't. But I do think we have to take the links off the wiki. I'm very sorry because I know a lot of hard work went into making all those videos.