Hey everyone, let's talk

As many of you probably know, there was a lot of drama last night. I could try to brush this under the rug because this isn't the most pleasant thing to talk about, but our community is so tight-knit and I know many of you have strong opinions about this. This is going to come out at some point, so we may as well get it over with.

Here are the events as I remember them:

1. Sheldon messages me and asks if I am releasing Blackheart tonight. I say in a couple days, he says, what's the holdup, I say I'm releasing it a couple days early for my patreon supporters. Sheldon does not like this, and responds with "You made 5% of the track" and "If you don't post it, I will." I do not respond to this because I don't like engaging with people who attack and threaten me.

2. Sheldon re-uploads an unlisted video I created (that was intended as a private preview of Blackheart) to his account, with a description that reads:

I do not support the release of monetized exclusive early releases for content you did not create, so here it is. Minus rabids monument. So yes all you patreon's get to see what rabid created first congratulations. Don't sell my/others work buddy.
Yes this was edited by rabid.
Rabids version will be available in a few days, this was a collab after all.
Also worth mentioning it took rabid a few months to finish the track after I sent him the finished track and he delayed it further by showing it first to those who pay him.

3. Dapianokid posts it in the skype chat, along with a healthy amount of angry words for me. I attempt to have a respectful discussion and defend my position but he is having none of it. OTDE and I leave the skype chat.

4. Sheldon posts the video on WRTL. OTDE deletes it on account of it being an unlisted preview created my myself, re-uploaded with malicious intentions and without my consent.

5. Dap reposts the video along with a long, rant-filled, sarcastic "review" of the track. This is deleted and Dap and Sheldon are both banned for a day.

6. Four new accounts are created with proxy IPs, and about a dozen new threads are made. At first they are reposting the video but then they devolve into threads such as "FUCKOTDE" with pornspam in them. OTDE and I lengthen dap and sheldon's bans to 30 days, hoping this will get the madness to stop. Thankfully, it does, and we go to bed.

-----

Here are some things that I want people to know:

1. It was my impression that Sheldon knew that Blackheart was going to be monetized on my Patreon when he agreed to create the final section of track. He was a supporter on Patreon up until about 3 weeks ago, and was getting quasi-weekly updates where I talked about how it was coming along and posted previews. The patreon page states clearly that large collabs I direct will be monetized. It should have been very clear to him that I was monetizing the project.

2. I am the main reason Blackheart ever got anywhere near finished. Yes, lots of people contributed, but I was the one who revived it in 2014, I was the one who kept asking around to see who was willing to do a part, I was the one who kept tabs on people who were supposed to be working on it, I was the one guiding the work of each collaborator to fit within the scope of the project. This involved many, many, many hours of conversation with the collaborators, skype sessions, sessions on the livestream, and the like. Sheldon himself sent me dozens of WIP sols to get feedback on the bit he had just made. In short, I directed a 3 and a half minute large-scale collaborative effort (aside from the first 30 seconds which boo directed). Directing a project is draining because it involves sticking with something for years - you can't just get inspired and have an 8 hour session of cranking it out, you have to continually do little bits of follow up and support over a long period of time (in this case, 2 years), and you have to persist despite setbacks, and there always are setbacks. In short, it's not easy.

3. The delay from Sheldon finished the track to the final release of the track was for a number of reasons. First, OTDE was fleshing out the starting monument, which took until a week or so ago because he was busy with school and nobody else wanted to do it. Second, Sheldon had shared the track with a number of people immediately after he finished his part, which made it more difficult for me to motivate myself to work on the ending monument. Third, nobody else was interested in making the ending monument. I wasn't terribly pumped to do make it, but since nobody else was going to and the track felt like it needed it, I eventually forced myself to do it anyway. But this took some time, as anyone who has had to force themselves to do something they weren't super excited about knows. Fourth, the last 3 months have been pretty rough for me on WRTL. The releases of Daisies and Broken drew a lot of bluntly expressed distaste, which has not been easy to deal with because of how personal these projects were for myself. Fifth, I have been busy with my job - I did four major theater designs in March and April, and that took a lot of time and some recovery time as well. And finally, I have been struggling with boo's death and this track's relationship to it. Many of you know that boo made no secret about his dislike for me, so adding a monument myself to the project that he envisioned because nobody else wanted to was an exceedingly strange feeling. I wanted to do justice to his vision though, because he had numerous great visions for great projects that never came to fruition. The only collaborative project that he directed that actually got finished was Limitations, which sadly gets most of its buzz from Sheldon and HP's parts at the end rather than boo's vision for the whole project. It was his directorial debut, and I was hoping he would go on to make better, more cohesive large-scale projects (hell, the first projects I directed were MacApples clan tracks that were quite mediocre), but obviously that never happened. These were all complicated emotions though, that took a while for me to work through.

4. I am asking nobody to pay for the track. Putting the video up on my patreon a couple days early is a form of thanking my patrons, and for getting the first responses on a project from people who care the most about the things I create. It's a small way of saying thank you, and it also helps me decide how to present it to the community. The "real release" is of course when I put it on youtube publicly.

5. The amount of money I am receiving (so far) is trivial. Here's what it breaks down to:
- $10 per project from OTDE
- $5 per project from shua
- $10 per project from my mom
- $3 per project from my sister
After Patreon's cut this amounts to $25 per project. So far, the published projects have been Phunky Scened, i squared, Daisies, Broken, and Blackheart (5 projects in 7 months)
At this point it would be silly for anyone claim that I am playing Line Rider for money. What patreons give me is a small gesture that shows me that someone really does care about what I do, which is something I have struggled with a lot. Honestly, if three more people signed up for $1 I would be over the moon, because it would mean that they don't have a lot of money but they like what I do and want me to make more, and that is insanely empowering. Of course I have hopes of growing this, and being able to justify spending tons and tons of hours on Line Rider instead of, say, a career. It takes money to survive, and if I could make a tiny tiny living creating Line Rider tracks, I would. But that's not where we are now. Where we are now amounts to small change. It's motivational but it's definitely not profit.

6. The fact that I am publishing work that I played a large role in but was not created entirely by myself on my patreon is a legitimate concern. If/when I do ever start receiving more money for projects, I will certainly want to start paying people who work on projects with me. This is only fair. My priorities are currently as follows:
- Developers of Line Rider are doing amazing work, and they deserve to get paid for it. Once(if) I reach $50 per release (that's about 50¢-$1 per hour of work for me) I will start giving some of that money (not sure how much) to Conundrumer, mhenr, LoneVampire, and kevansevans.
- My fellow staff members are doing thankless and often unpleasant work (and have been since the site began) and they deserve to get paid for it. Once(if) I reach $100 (tentatively, this would certainly be a ways down the road) I will start giving some of that money to current and past staff members who did and/or continue to do good work for our community.
- After we pass both of these, this would be the point where I would start paying people for creating parts. Writing contracts and everything.
None of this is set in stone - all of it is up for potential change. I want to hear from anyone who has any thoughts or input about this. But I do ask that you are respectful, and I reserve the right to decline to respond if you are not. Attempts to engage someone with verbal abuse, threats, and angry sarcastic comments, reposting someone's material without consent or even an attempt to make sure your assumptions are correct, creating duplicate accounts, and spamming porn on the site are not constructive ways to engage with ANYONE.

7. We have no way to verify who is making a proxy account. This kind of attack forces the staff to do things like lengthen bans of people at the source of the attacks, even if they are not directly responsible, because there is no way to prove if anyone is telling the truth about who made the duplicate accounts and spammed porn. If you are going to incite people to spam porn on the site via proxies, that is your responsibility. To quote an episode of Louie, "This is your man-shit mess. You gotta clean it up."

-----

I would love to have a healthy respectful discussion about any/all of this with anyone who is interested. I am not saying you have to kiss my ass (please PLEASE don't do that), just that you have to treat me like a person who you may disagree with, who wants the best for our community, but who also has emotions that you should avoid trampling over. In short, basic respect for another human.

That said, please do not post sheldon's re-upload of my private preview, and I would encourage you to wait until the actual release is posted (in a couple days) before you watch the track. (Though if you want to go watch it, I obviously can't stop you)

Thanks for reading.

Alright take two... accidentally hit refresh instead of clicking on a tab in chrome and lost the hug wall of text I already typed out

Basically I'm going to shorten my first point down to a tl;dr so I don't have to type it all again.

I'm not going to list as many points as you did in your post but most of what you said should be included in the ones I do list so that I don't have to type as much. Always willing to go into more detail about anything I said if asked though.


After reading your post over twice I can see that both parties in the story both did things they shouldn't have and are both in the wrong just as much as the other.


1 tl;dr) Sheldon didn't have the consent/permission to post the finished track without your say so Rabid. You made a part of the track, albeit a small part, but a part none the less. That's bad manered on his part.

2) Onto my second point/paragraph/thing a mah jig. You said that it was your impression that Sheldon knew that you were monetizing the track and it would be seen early by your backers/paterons. You assumed he knew. Im not sure if you know the saying about assuming things for people but it goes like this. When you assume, you make an ass out of u and me. To be honest this is all hearsay and he said she said bullshit. From what we can tell though, Sheldon didn't know you were going to monetize it and if that's the case then that brings up another huge issue. You also did not have Sheldons consent/permission to release the track early to your backers/patreons or to monetize it. What gives you the right to choose when to release the track when you want but not have/let Sheldon release the track how or when he wants?



To be honest, I don't think you should be monetizing any project you don't make completley by yourself. I see it as an artist stealing other artists work. Now if you were to get the other people that contributed to the track then so be it, but you better make sure it's written consent with proof so that you don't get fucked over later on. I am on the side that what you did is wrong (especially monetizing a track that boo helped make, boo, who's not with us anymore. You're monetizing a mans work that isn't alive to say no, for your own profit.) But what Sheldon and Dap did is also wrong.


I'm not going to comment on the other things such as them making accounts and posting porn. But next time (seeing as you were online and if theres a next time) don't have OTDE remove the thread, do it yourself. Theres no reason for him to get drug into this mess.


Most of this was written and typed up better the first time around but I don't have much time as I have a game tournament to play in in a few hours and need to practice for it so if theres anything you want me to elaborate on then feel free to ask.

To clarify:
I was not "drug" into this. I made the choice to remove the posts because they were directly attacking staff.

Couple of other points to consider:

1. Rabid is not monetizing other people's work. The patreon exists as a tip jar for anything rabid spends a lot of time on. The only thing being monetized are the pieces rabid made (i.e. the editing, the monument, the organization).
   
2. Sheldon's upload excluded the entirety of my work on the opening monument and editing with some rather touching (IMO) words about .boo while also being a video that was recorded and edited by someone else. The presentation of the work is entirely rabid's in both videos, with the difference being that the first was explicitly private.
   
3. Rabid explicitly states which tracks are and aren't monetized. To put it bluntly, Sheldon was an absolute dumbass if he didn't read the progress posts rabid made every single week. I'm sorry, it's just really obviously out there, and it took a lot of willful ignorance on his part to get to this point.
   
4. People collaborate on Patreon-monetized videos where one collaborator isn't paid all the time. It's actually a really common practice. It's an understood liability when you collaborate with someone who has a patreon.
   

Will post about my feelings later (I'M GONNA GO HOME AND LISTEN TO LINKIN PARK)

EDIT: OTDE's post is more concise and covers most of what I said here better, but I typed it up before he posted, so here you go anyway

@Rev

Sheldon was aware throughout the process of the previews that were being released early to patreon supporters, as he was one himself. So obviously I had his consent to do that. This goes for everyone who works on a project with me. I don't know how he could possibly have ended up under the impression that it wasn't going to be a paid release. I'm pretty sure he knew, but he never said it explicitly so there's no way to prove that.

About wanting to release it different ways... if sheldon has done his own recording and editing and release, it still would have been kind of a dick move, but we wouldn't have deleted the thread. But a private preview I made, reuploaded on his own channel, is a totally different story. Does that answer your question about who has the "right" to do what?

I think you should re-read points #4, #5, and #6, because the arguments you are giving about monetizing collaborations were addressed there. Think of it this way: by supporting me on patreon, people are supporting my work on projects. As long as I am not making you pay to watch the track (which I am not doing), the argument that I shouldn't be making money off of a collaboration just because nobody else is doesn't really hold water. You can give me money or not give me money, and you can also give sheldon money or not give him money, and that goes for everyone else who worked on anything ever.

People do volunteer work for people who are making money all the time, and there's nothing wrong about it as long as they aren't under the impression they will get paid. People profit off of movies that dead people worked on all the time, there's nothing wrong about that either. Would you say that they should give away the movie for free because they can't pay the person who died? Also note, these are people who actually make minimum wage, not cents per hour.

I also elaborated that I do want to pay people who work on collaborations but I have other priorities that are higher. You can make an argument that I should re-evaluate those priorities but just telling me to not ask for money isn't going to be constructive.

However, it's apparent that I should do more work to let people know ahead of time if they are working on a project that will be monetized, and the previews and early release and such. Then people can make a fully informed choice. I've resisted doing this because it's hard enough getting people to work on a project without throwing a bunch of disclaimers in someone's face, but it's clear that some people care a shockling large amount about those $25 I am receiving :/

But if you don't like the idea of make making money off collaborations, it's pretty simple what you should do - just don't participate in collaborations, and don't give me money.

I'm not really involved in this but I thought I'd throw in my opinion, because I can easily see myself getting angry over something like this.

First off, I think that if you (Rabid) have a right to release something early to your supporters, then Sheldon equally has a right to release something to his supporters (say via YouTube). That's just simple fairness, in my view. The idea that there is some sort of implicit consent here because "he should have known" is, I think, difficult to believe. For example, I can easily see myself wanting to support you on a site like Patreon because of all the work you do maintaining the site (which I'm thankful for), but I probably wouldn't bother to read the project previews (sorry). In any kind of real world situation, all organizations, whether for or not for profit, always make sure they get explicit authorization to use other people's work. Arguments based on a sort of "well they would have known what was going to happen if they bothered to find out" wouldn't hold up in court. Obviously this is just a line rider site and doesn't (and shouldn't) require the full bureaucracy of a legal system, but I think given that it's easy to foresee someone having an objection to this, the same sort of principle applies. What's more, although maybe Sheldon "should have known", the rest of the collab members didn't have any way of knowing, and I imagine you probably don't have consent from all of them.

Secondly, I'd like to explain what I think is some tension you've been feeling between what I'd call "technical track makers" and "visionaries" (where I suppose you would consider yourself part of the second group). The key quote is here:

Rabid Squirrel wrote:Directing a project is draining because it involves sticking with something for years - you can't just get inspired and have an 8 hour session of cranking it out, you have to continually do little bits of follow up and support over a long period of time (in this case, 2 years), and you have to persist despite setbacks, and there always are setbacks. In short, it's not easy.

You see, it's pretty common, in all areas of life, for there to be tension between people who do the "skilled labour" if you like (I don't know what else to call it) and people who are on the more managerial side of things. For example, I'm a Computer Science major. In programming and tech startups, programmers like to tell stories about what are called "idea people". An idea person is a person who has no technical understanding, no programming or engineering ability, but has convinced themselves they have a great idea for some kind of new project or gadget that will make them into the next super-rich tech entrepreneur -- all they need is a few programmers and engineers to do the grunt work. The ideas proposed by idea people are typically impossible, or highly impracticable, but the idea people don't see this because of their lack of technical experience, and when the programmers or engineers they employ eventually hack something together which is at least in the spirit of what they requested (but with several crucial modifications to get the whole thing to actually make sense), the idea people consider their contribution to be the key component of the whole project that brought everything together, and the hard work of their employees to be just technical details and nothing particularly special.

Now, let me be absolutely clear about something. What I've just described is a caricature. I am NOT suggesting you (Rabid) fit this description -- I think your work on the site and line rider generally is very valuable and I imagine this game would probably be completely dead without all the work you've put into organizing things and keeping it alive. I'm using the analogy to try to explain how things can come across, especially when you describe track making (dismissively) as "you can't just get inspired and have an 8 hour session of cranking it out". As a track maker myself who has devoted hundreds and hundreds of hours and struggled countless times with motivation to finish things, if only it were that easy!

This is also why you get some criticism for your recent work -- I remember you (can't find the quote exactly) describing yourself with being happy with how little time you spent making a track. This really rubs people the wrong way. When someone releases a highly technical track that they spent months working on and gets maybe ~10 to ~15 comments on it because, you know, "oh well it's just another quirk", and at the same time they see someone getting 30ish comments on a track that was made in a few hours, that can be really aggravating.

In fact, it's happened to me before. One of the things that made me rethink and reconsider how I was playing (and if I should be playing) line rider, was Nirobi's "The Painting", which I'm sure you remember. It was released near the time I made a track I was pretty proud of (I think Overdrive?) and I remember being bitter (remember I was 13 at the time) that Nirobi's thread had significantly more comments than mine on IRTL. My reasoning was that, well, what I've made is very technical and impressive and took a long time and so on, and in the case of The Painting you can't even *see* the track! So I felt bad cause I thought "I've done something that everyone should appreciate and took me a very long time, and it turns out I could've gotten much more comments if I did this other thing that would've taken me much less time but has the selling point of being 'original'". Now, of course, Overdrive is a quintessential "just another quirk" track (and I wouldn't make something like that again), and Nirobi's track still has replay value, but that's how I felt at the time.

As an aside, looking at the comments on Broken for instance, most people are largely positive. I think most trackmakers would love to have people say they were "inspired" and "loved" a track that they made in a few hours -- that's actually very rare. Sure, there are critics, but there are always critics. I would be very happy with a track I made if I got the kind of response you did, even if there were a few people who didn't like it.

So, to sum up, track makers (including in the past myself) get annoyed if they feel there is some kind of "injustice" in how a track is being received or how (and whether) work is being appreciated, and this can result in negativity. I wouldn't take it personally.

Sorry if my phrasing about the 8 hour session came off as dismissive. I'm sure you know that I too have spent hundreds of hours on many projects. My point is that when you do "technical work" you can work at your own pace. You can work 50 hours one week and then 0 the next. But when you're directing a project, you can't choose (to nearly the same extent) when or how often you do the work. You are entirely dependent on when the people you can get to do the technical work are inspired and working hard and when they are not. You can't schedule it into your day and you never know how long it will take in the short term or the long term. You have to make sure you regularly remind people to work on things, and when they do you have to be right there, right away, if at all possible, to provide feedback and to keep them on the right track. It's draining.

Also, note that I was proud of Broken *despite* only spending about 10 hours of work on it, not *because* of that (which would of course be idiotic)

To reply to your first point, I agree sheldon has the "right" (meaning it would be within the site rules) to do his own recording, editing, and release of blackheart based on the part he made. It would be pretty dickish, but it wouldn't be something that we would just delete. BUT what he DID was to reupload a video that I CREATED, which was originally uploaded as an EXPLICITLY PRIVATE preview. I've said this twice now and OTDE has said it too, so I'm adding caps this time so people won't miss it.

rabid squirrel wrote:Also, note that I was proud of Broken *despite* only spending about 10 hours of work on it, not *because* of that (which would of course be idiotic)

Yeah I probably misread something.

rabid squirrel wrote:To reply to your first point, I agree sheldon has the right to do his own recording, editing, and release of blackheart based on the part he made. It would be pretty dickish, but it wouldn't be something that we would just delete. BUT what he DID was to reupload a video that I CREATED, which was originally uploaded as an EXPLICITLY PRIVATE preview. I've said this twice now and OTDE has said it too, so I'm adding caps this time so people won't miss it.

I didn't miss this, but I don't see how it changes anything. You created the video, and he created his part. You are both releasing something of each other's work without explicit permission. I think the situation is (roughly) equivalent. Yes, you did say it was "EXPLICITLY PRIVATE", but I don't think it changes that much if there is already a feeling that some kind of trust has been broken.

I don't quite see how I am releasing something without his permission. More like I'm just releasing it later than he wanted me to release it...

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All of this aside... after reading some responses and thinking on this I've realized that I can do better in the realm of informing people what collaborative projects I am planning on monetizing, and what other things that entails (such as early releases). There's not much I can do about parts that have already been made, beyond listening to people who have made them and attempting to accomodate any requests, but for the future I will attempt to be more up-front about this stuff. I think I sort of said this in my previous post in this thread but I want to be clear that I have realized that the issue Sheldon was attempting to address was a legitimate one, and I have been remiss in being fair to collaborators. The way he addressed it was wildly unconstructive and inappropriate, so it has taken me a while to come to terms with the fact that the original issue was a legitimate one. But it was, and I will begin attempting to rectify it as I move forward.

I'll come back and respond and read what everone else in here has said tomorrow. I just got out of 2 different tournaments for 2 different games (almost 9 straight hours of league of legends and rocket league), I just want to go die in my bed until work tomorrow.

I think the main problem is that people aren't clear on what Rabid's right to monetize/release early the video. From what I can tell, Rabid took a lot of time and effort to keep the project going, and because of how patreon is set up I do think he should be able to monetize it for his efforts. I don't think he should have waited to release it early to a few people. It was a project he help lead, but it isn't his track. It's a collaboration so it has many authors, and Rabid wasn't the only lead in the project. The proper thing to do would have been to just release it for all those who worked on it too see it. This is probably how Sheldon felt and that's why he wanted to release it as soon as it was finished minus a few things.
We must realize that Sheldon and DAP are not very wise. They are good at Linerider, but as people are much less mature than most of the other people in the community and acted childish in their frustration. After Sheldon was told to not post the video he should have just respectfully been patient even though he thought it was not the best decision. DAP is just. DAP. He has to be treated like a small child and gets in trouble like one. Both of them are very stubborn and have caused trouble around here before with their childish antics. I doubt they'll come back after being banned like this, but I wouldn't really be sad. I'm tired of all the drama they cause. They have done incredible things for the linerider meta with all the advancement of kramual technology, but until they mature as people they can find another community to join imo.

This isn't a response to acp's post, but I realized that I could do to elaborate a bit on this point:

rabid squirrel wrote:4. I am asking nobody to pay for the track. Putting the video up on my patreon a couple days early is a form of thanking my patrons, and for getting the first responses on a project from people who care the most about the things I create. It's a small way of saying thank you, and it also helps me decide how to present it to the community. The "real release" is of course when I put it on youtube publicly.

Think of this as an extension of private previews. I've been putting private previews of collaborations on Patreon (and sharing them with people who are involved if they want to know how the project is coming) for the last 7 months (something sheldon was fully aware of and totally fine with) Putting the video up is early is sort of like another private preview except it is the whole track.

The thing that makes it more of a "thank you" than a "pre-order" is that I don't advertise the content that is on the patreon (I don't even tell anyone who isn't a patron what is on my patreon). You don't see me saying "Sign up for my patreon now and see [xyz track] now, three days before anyone else gets to see it!" or "You'll love the previews for [track a] and [track b], only $3 to sign up and see them!" I'm not running a business, and I have no desire to. Instead all I say is "Support My Art" (see my signature), and then if you want to support my art I want to give you things back in return, to 1) say thank you 2) engage with you and 3) blog about what I am doing in your general direction.

It's a shame something so small has grown into something so big. It shocks me that people have such bad expectations from rabid. I just don't understand how you could think of rabid as a bad person, especially an egoistic person. He's done more for others than anyone else.

I think the controversial part of this is that although you don't ask anyone to pay for a track, you do decide whether people pay you for a release or not. You're not selling the track, but you are directly making money off of it by putting it on Patreon. Ethically you should ask permission for that, although making such a big deal out of not asking permission for something so small is obviously way overdone.

Hope you know most people here love you. Focus on those people and not on the haters. <3

Rafael wrote:It's a shame something so small has grown into something so big. It shocks me that people have such bad expectations from rabid.

Rabid is the person who has done the most for this community. IF ANYONE DESERVES TO MAKE FUCKING MONEY OFF OF LR, ITS HIM.

Even if what Rabid did was unjust, I don't think Sheldon's (and Dap's) actions are justified. If I'd be put in that situation, I'd make a thread about it explaining that I think what rabid is doing is unjust and try to get people to support me, hopefully somehow changing rabid's mind and show him he did something wrong.

Side Note: I don't really see the big deal that rabid is releasing something a little earlier to his patreon supporters. You can't wait a few days for the release of a track? If it's just about principles, I think the reaction is way out of proportions.

This will be blunt because I want to address it from as much of a legal perspective as I can (IANAL though), but I want to make it clear that I don't personally harbour any kind of ill will to either side. We all make mistakes and it's not worth throwing away the good parts of relationships with people over events that we should just learn from and then put behind us. Here's my take on the situation in essentially chronological order, and it's obviously important to note that I can't comment or form a view on things/statements/events that haven't been made public.


Neither party's behaviour in this situation was appropriate conduct.

The Initial Leak

Rabid should not have made an early release of the collaboration without the explicit positive consent of all creators involved. Everything about it being to Patreons, tipping, etc is entirely irrelevant to this discussion (i.e the only truly relevant points to this discussion from the "Here are some things that I want people to know" part of the OP are 1 and 7). In no country is copyright something that you have to "claim" - it's yours and "all rights reserved" by default. Unless they indicate otherwise, authors of creative work retain the exclusive copyright to their work. As such, you can't assume that no response from them regarding something that you think appears to be blatantly obvious is an implied consent. It's hard not to use double negatives here, but to put this into different terms, a YouTube creator not saying "don't re-upload my video elsewhere" does not mean you can assume that they'll let you re-upload their video. It doesn't matter that Sheldon was aware about previous tracks, the only thing that matters is whether he consented in this particular case (he clearly did not, and that was made clear before the initial leak).

(This is why in previous thread about a "recovery project" I've been extremely bullish about the community's prospects of successfully re-uploading other people's work to an archive channel - copyright gives all of the rights including the right not to share work to the creator and that is by design)

If you want to release the collaborative work without the consent of a particular creator you will need to remove all traces of their work. If that makes the track unplayable because it's a scenery track and the relevant work was the underlying track, that's too bad for you. Put out a screenshot of your scenery with the naked lines erased. Because things like that can cause a big hassle in a lot of cases and ruin projects, it's not uncommon for projects of all kinds to ask collaborators to agree to license their work in a particular way or give up their copyright on the contributed work, to allow the leaders of the project to make decisions regarding certain aspects of the project without needing to get this consent. For example, open source software projects won't accept contributions from authors unless those authors agree to license their contributions under an open source license that the project owners are comfortable with. Similarly, when you're working as an employee of a company your employment contract will include a clause that sees you give up your personal copyrights on work you do for a company to that company so that they have the power to make decisions regarding their products without having to consult everyone who has worked on those products.

Sheldon's Response

Sheldon should not have posted the private video in response. My earlier point about re-uploading videos is just as true here - he can't go and rip or otherwise re-distribute someone else's video because he doesn't hold the copyright to the editing and production of that video. He would be free to post his own recording of just his work as that's all he owns the copyright to, but that's not what happened.

The correct response from Sheldon would have been to issue a YouTube takedown notice on Rabid's video and resolve the copyright issue privately with Rabid and the rest of the people associated with the collab. This shouldn't have turned into a public affair, and the DMCA exists for exactly these kinds of situations (the music you use in your videos might only constitute a small part of the production but without having the rights to use that music your whole video can be taken down - the same logic applies to you releasing a small part of track that you don't have the rights to use and a takedown would be justified).

Moderation and Perceptions of Bias

With regards to moderation and the deletion of posts/bans, WRtL does not have any stated policy surrounding things like this and the closest thing I got from OTDE to a policy was simply "no leaks". Rabid's post also mentions this:

Sheldon posts the video on WRTL. OTDE deletes it on account of it being an unlisted preview created my myself, re-uploaded with malicious intentions and without my consent.

I think all of us would agree that this is a good policy and it should be codified in the site rules - if it gets brought to the attention of a member of staff that something is a leak (where a leak is a post of content that the poster didn't have the copyright/consent of copyright holders) then the post should be removed. This was the policy that was used to remove the original post - if you look at the screenshot that was shared of Sheldon's post it wasn't spammy or breaking any of the site's rules at all. In fact, you'll see a snarky comment from Sheldon making exactly that point. The only fault with the post was that it was a leak.

The thing I want to make a point about re moderation is that it creates an unfortunate perception of bias when one of the members of staff is deleting posts of leaks, while one of the members of staff won't take down his own leak. It draws OTDE into something and makes him appear/have to take a side, even though he's just trying to do the best he can with moderating the forums. While Sheldon and Dap shouldn't have spammed the forums in response to the initial post removal (you don't break the site rules just because you think someone else is doing something unjust), I can understand the emotions they were feeling that drove them to do so.

The Future

We have a chance to learn from this and make sure that this kind of thing doesn't happen again. Personally, I recommend that we should do the following (and some of these things have already been mentioned in earlier posts in this thread):

• Officially codify the policy of "no leaks".
  
• When taking down leaks, remind everyone involved (where possible) that if they actually hold the copyright to any part of the leaked material and never consented to it being posted that they have the right to have the video host take down the video. A reminder about using takedown power serves as a nice way to nullify any allegations of bias. (On-site leaks = moderation team's responsibility to remove, off-site leaks = your own responsibility to remove and that part of things should be kept off-site)
  
• Be more upfront about early releases/exclusives in collaborations. Unless you're absolutely certain that a contributor to the track consents to there being an exclusive release window for the track, you shouldn't accept their contributions. Even if the top of the thread has something saying "by contributing to this track you agree that the creators are entitled to an exclusive release window for the track before a public release", you have no way of knowing that the contributor has actually seen and agreed to that clause. You need them to explicitly say to you that they agree.
  
• Unban Sheldon and Dap immediately as a gesture of goodwill and understanding that this issue won't happen again. I'm aware that their bans could be easily justified as they spammed while rabid didn't, and in Sheldon's case it would be largely symbolic as I don't think he wants anything to do with WRtL anymore. However, this wasn't really precedented and we didn't have any existing codified policies to deal with it. Given that the spamming was a heat-of-the-moment thing that I think most of us can empathise with (if you didn't have a rock-solid understanding of copyright law, you would have felt entirely powerless in their situation so what else would you do), I think it would be reasonable to make a one-off pardon in this particular instance. The staff may feel otherwise and it's their decision to make, but it's hard to move on from things like this when one party gets off scot free while the other cops a one month ban, even though both parties acted inappropriately.
  

Mhenr, I'm sorry to say that I disagree with you on almost all of these points. I also feel like your post comes off as extremely condescending, like you're attempting to teach me about something I know nothing about.

1) I am not interested in looking at this from a legal perspective, but from a moral perspective. When people clash, what is the most just course of action? Of course this is subjective, and has always been, but following the law is not always the right course of action (otherwise why would laws change?). Copyright law is one of the most ridiculously outdated sections of US law, and makes most digital artmaking virtually impossible. And in this case, legalities are highly irrelevant because we are dealing with a ridiculously small amount of money. Translation: This case would get thrown out of court in about .00001 seconds.

2) Getting a contract from every person who works on a collab with you is completely unnecessary at this point, not to mention ridiculous. Of course, once (if) a reasonable amount of money starts to be circulating then this would be important, but as it stands it's just absurd to say that once 4 people are giving you tiny amounts of money to help you to do work, and you share with them the collabs you are working on, that now everyone you work with needs a contract to sign saying that they are okay with that.

3) If you DO want to get all legal about it, copyright law, does NOT give an artist the power to destroy their own work and never allow anyone to see it again. There are actually exceptions clauses that allow archives to display works for free if other copies have been lost or destroyed. As long as the recovery project doesn't monetize the views of these reuploaded videos it is in fact following copyright law. I will admit this is a something of a grey area, but again, this would get thrown out of court in a millionth of a second. The important thing is that the point of copyright law is to prevent people from selling your work. As in, charging people money to see it, buy it, use it, etc. That's not happening here.

4) Here's an example of how following the law to the letter is completely unworkable. What if, for example, summoning decided to revoke his part of blackheart? (He made about 10 seconds of manuquirk right at the beginning) It renders the entire project impossible to publish or distribute in any way, despite TONS of people working on it for many, many hours. It may be LEGAL but is it RIGHT? I don't think it is. I don't think it is right for one person in a giant collaborative project to be able to veto the entire project, and furthermore it's not even relevant to copyright law unless they have a legitimate claim to what copyright lawyers call "monetary loss."

5) Furthermore, there is a key fact you are missing here. Sheldon was not disputing the release of a video, he was disputing the DELAY of a release. He wanted it to be released on Thursday, not on Sunday. When he posted the reupload, I had not yet even posted it on my Patreon, I had only told him I was going to. He didn't want to take the video down or prevent it from being uploaded, he wanted to MAKE me publish it NOW. That's definitely not covered under copyright law.

6) As staff, we make it a general policy to avoid taking action against issues we may be biased about. I am obviously biased about sheldon's reuploading of my video so I left it to OTDE to make that call. I did not ask him to do my dirty work for me, I told him I didn't want to take action because I was biased, and let him make the call. This is a very common thing.

7) The rules do not need to be changed. There is a rule that clearly states "Anything else the staff considers disruptive to the community." If you think something may violate this rule, you can always ask. If someone mistakenly posts something that is decided violates this, it will be deleted but no disciplinary actions will be taken against the user. But if, instead of asking, you repost something that was deleted, that is when take coercive action. This clause in the rules exists for exactly these situations.

8) Absolutely no unbanning of sheldon or dap will take place. First of all, it's not a one-off situation, as they have waged similar attacks on staff before when they disagreed with something. Second of all, saying that we should be able to empathize with people who spammed our site with shock porn and unmasked hate is downright offensive. No decent human being would do these things in the "heat of the moment," and if you think otherwise you should check your privilege.

9) I am interested in being as just and fair as possible, but the rules and policies on this site are not up to anyone's interpretation, it is up to the interpretation of the staff. You are not permitted to tell the staff they need to to unban someone or to change the rules, and nobody on the staff team is obliged to explain their interpretation of the policy to you. You do not make the rules on this site, just as I cannot go to your house and tell you that I SHOULD be allowed to do something that you don't want me to do.

I too, would like to put this behind me. But if you think your post is moving us in that direction you are gravely mistaken.

(EDIT: I misread part of section 5, I've altered my response because of that)

When people clash, what is the most just course of action?

The course that those people have all agreed to - i.e the law or rules. Morals and ideals of "justness" change over time/from person to person, and it's unfair to hold people accountable to those morals/ideals unless they know what they are. That's why laws exist. (sure, they change over time because our morals and ideals change, but I can easily look up laws. I can't easily look up your personal moral code)

The reason I'm looking at this purely through the lens of copyright is because copyright law is designed to handle exactly what's happened here. It's also because copyright law is what gives you grounds to complain about Sheldon re-distributing your video under terms that you don't approve of, but you seem to ignore the fact that your video was re-distributing his work under terms that he didn't approve of.

2) Getting a contract from every person who works on a collab with you is completely unnecessary at this point, not to mention ridiculous.

The reality is that most of us share the exact same views on how collabs should be run and we don't need to bother wasting our time agreeing to terms. It's why we've had hundreds of successful collabs and issues like this haven't blown up.

It's only when you end up with differing views that it's important to get agreement. It's usually far easier to get this agreement upfront in a project and then you can point back and say "we all agreed to that". Otherwise, you have to worry about what happens when someone says "no" at a later date and might have the ability to torpedo a lot of hard work.

This agreement doesn't have to be some formal contract:

Hey I want to be able to make an early release of this for my Patreon supporters and delay the public release for a few days, do you mind?

Just get an answer to that from contributors and once they all say yes, you're golden. They can't go back on their word and later say no.

3) If you DO want to get all legal about it, copyright law, does NOT give an artist the power to destroy their own work and never allow anyone to see it again.

I'll address this at some point later because archival exemptions to copyright laws aren't relevant to this particular discussion, but I definitely would love to see your sources that allow archives to re-distribute work during the copyright period of that work.

4) Here's an example of how following the law to the letter is completely unworkable. What if, for example, summoning decided to revoke his part of blackheart? (He made about 10 seconds of manuquirk right at the beginning)

It's not unworkable because copyright doesn't stop authors from giving away certain rights. If you're dealing with people that you think might pose a risk of torpedoing a project, make them agree to not revoke their work. You can hold them to this agreement later if they try and pull a fast one on you (and at that point, copyright law would be on your side. If they tried to do a DMCA takedown on YouTube you'd be able to show YT that post and prove that the takedown is bullshit).

In practice we don't need to get this agreement from a lot of people and we don't have to worry about people saying "no" later on because we all share largely the same views. It's just that if you have people that share different views on something and there wasn't agreement ahead of time, issues like this come up and you run the risk of someone torpedoing a project because they happened to do some of the groundwork that everything else has built on.

5) Furthermore, there is a key fact you are missing here. Sheldon was not disputing the release of a video, he was disputing the DELAY of a release.

He was disputing the exclusive release of the video to your Patreons. You didn't delay the release of the video - you released it exclusively to your Patreons and then to the general public at a later point. It doesn't matter whether it only ended up being to a handful of people, and it doesn't even matter that there was money involved. All of that is entirely irrelevant - all that matters is that your release to Patreons was a re-distribution of Sheldon's work that he didn't agree to.

EDIT:

What I hadn't realised was that Sheldon leaked first. Because I'm not a Patreon supporter I can't actually answer this myself - did you then continue to post the video to your Patreon supporters after that? If you didn't, this is all a totally flawed interpretation and it's 100% Sheldon who's in the wrong. (If you did post it, then the blame is shared and I stand by what I said, just flip the order of events)

6) As staff, we make it a general policy to avoid taking action against issues we may be biased about. I am obviously biased about sheldon's reuploading of my video so I left it to OTDE to make that call. I did not ask him to do my dirty work for me, I told him I didn't want to take action because I was biased, and let him make the call. This is a very common thing.

I agree entirely, that's why I was referring to a "perception" of bias and not actually claiming that the staff's actions in this were actually biased.

7) The rules do not need to be changed. There is a rule that clearly states "Anything else the staff considers disruptive to the community."

It's about perceptions of bias. Suppose the staff considered posts about bananas disruptive and staff member A removed a post because it was about bananas. It would look bad if a different member of staff (B) happened to run an off-site blog about bananas, because it makes the staff member A appear to look biased towards member B.

They aren't actually biased (B's blog is off-site so it's not like A could do anything about it), but it's far easier to remove that perception if they can say "look, here's the rule that I'm enforcing by deleting this post, I'm just doing my job of enforcing on-site rules".

8) Absolutely no unbanning of sheldon or dap will take place. First of all, it's not a one-off situation, as they have waged similar attacks on staff before when they disagreed with something. Second of all, saying that we should be able to empathize with people who spammed our site with shock porn and unmasked hate is downright offensive.

I made it clear at the beginning that I was basing my views on the information that I had available. Because the moderation team do such a good job of quickly removing spam and attacks against people, un-ranked members aren't always aware of specifics like that until you share them with us. My impression was that the spam was posts of the track and a few "fuck the staff" kinds of posts, not shock porn. With that context, I can get why you wouldn't want to unban them.


Really, I think you'd agree with everything else I've been saying if you were to agree about point 5 (that you re-distributed Sheldon's work without his consent). Why don't you think you were re-distributing his work without his consent? (edit: look at my comments on section 5)

Maybe you should just only show your solo projects on patreon

Regardless of morals / legal issues / expecations / assumptions, this is the way I see it.

If you're doing a solo project, it's your work. Do whatever you want.
If you're doing a collab you plan on monetizing, ask every participant if they're cool with you monetizing it. If you're doing a collab, you're in contact with the other people. There's no reason you can't ask, if just for clarification, "hey, is it cool if I show this to my patreon supporters a couple days before it's uploaded to YouTube?"

From rabid's perspective - There's no reason not to ask before uploading the content. Unless you were 100% sure he'd say no, and you'd rather make $25 and have a thread like this, there is no reason not to get written consent.

From Sheldon's perspective - Uploading a video that excludes rabid's part was childish, but completely fine in my perspective. It's essentially, similar to rabid, a preview to your subscribers. It wasn't finished, so it wasn't stealing content that rabid would otherwise post to his own channel.

As far as the multi-accounts - What is this even. The fact that you blatantly made accounts to harass the website, and not only affect rabid / OTDE, but ruin the entire site for a day, deserves more than a day ban. You acted extremely immature and childish for absolutely no reason except "I was angry at someone, and instead of being mature I decided to try and ruin an entire website."

tl;dr: rabid was dumb, should have asked. Sheldon then retaliated in a legitimate way, posting his own preview. Spiteful, but fine. Then everything went to shit with the multi accounts, got completely out of hand and really just shows how stupid people can be when things don't go their way.

Don't know if this is rational or not, but personally it feels weird and wrong that you're indirectly making money off my work*, which I didn't even know about till after the release. I know you probably disagree.

EDIT: *and, more importantly, the hard work from everybody else involved

Helios Pavonine wrote:Don't know if this is rational or not, but personally it feels weird and wrong that you're indirectly making money off my work, which I didn't even know about till after the release. I know you probably disagree.

I don't know the details but if it's true that's pretty screwed.


Rabid was wrong
Sheldon was right until he and dap went crazy and then he was wrong.


My solution? We build a wall and make sheldon pay for it.

I sort of feel like a broken record here, repeating myself forever, but I'll go at this again.

1) Yes, I've been remiss about informing people about putting large collabs on patreon. I underestimated how much people would care about me making a tiny amount of money off voluntary donations from friends and family. There's not much I can do about parts that have already been made but going forward I'll make sure everyone is aware.

2) It would be fine (well sort of dickish but not wrong per se) for sheldon to record, edit, and release a version of blackheart excluding my part and upload it to his own channel. But instead, he reuploaded a preview that I CREATED as a private preview, which is why the post was deleted.

rabid squirrel wrote:1) Yes, I've been remiss about informing people about putting large collabs on patreon. I underestimated how much people would care about me making a tiny amount of money off voluntary donations from friends and family. There's not much I can do about parts that have already been made but going forward I'll make sure everyone is aware.

I think people are repeating theirselves because they're missing something from you. You say you should have informed people about putting collabs on patreon. They say you should have asked permission for it. You still put it in Patreon even though many don't consider that justified.