Re: AsciiArtists

[Oh dear! One does find interesting things sometimes! (yes, I'm a little
bit behind in my reading)]

[The post I'm responding to was sent three weeks ago, and the name
"patches" sounds way too familiar in this context. She's been doing this
before, and been criticised for it, so our reaction to her (and her
friends') behaviour is NOT news to her...]


patches wrote:
> 
> >""""Ascii artists deserve the same respect, if there initials are on their
> >art, please respect their rights, they are the original artist of that work
> >and deserve to have there initials left in that art. They are the sole owner
> >of that art and if they chose to share it with you on there website for you
> >to play with, and color then put your own initials in, you should respect the
> >original work and keep there credit no matter what you change in that file.
> 
> You are correct, all of this is on my website, but not in the eCards section,
> and it is only in the "shows" and file download sections" and as I stated
> before, I am not responsible for the eCards section of the site. 

This is not clear. In fact, it says on the eCard page:

  "All material on this site copyright mIRC_Rainbow.
   Webdesign & coding by P.G Smith. Made possible
   thanks to Patches:)".

Further, the eCards section is presented as a *part of* your website.
The exact words on the main page are:

  "Places To Visit Within #mIRC_Rainbow's Home."

followed by a number of links, one of which is to the "eCards" page. At
the bottom of the page it says:

  "This site is owned & maintained by M.Pe�a (patches)".

> It is the only
> section of the site that I do not do any work on at all.  Pete is aware of the
> problems there and is fixing them. 

I follow the description in the original post and have no problem
finding the file in question:

   http://www.mirc-rainbow.com/ecards/cards/romantic_1.gif

I even went so far as to save a copy and open in a graphics program
(xpaint). I then "poured" green colour into the black background area
(to reveal if there are any almost-but-not-quite black pixels in the
picture). The whole area filled up. The information (Joan's initials)
could not be found in the picture. The only artist mentioned in that
picture is AnglTooch.

I then looked around and saw that it wasn't just ONE picture either...

<snip>
> However, there is at least one section on the website where there is other art
> with many ascii artists involved (and we aren't talking 12 pictures, we are
> talking more in the neighborhood of 2000 pictures),

"12"?

*counts pictures*

I find 7+21+14+7+3=52 pictures.

Of these only about half have the artist's initials on them (most of
those are by Sher). In particular, the picture that started the
discussion still does not have Joan's initials on it.

[BTW, the ambulance picture is broken, and one of the birthday cake
pictures is broken, and the apparent link to "Friends" isn't clickable]

> and while the art does not
> show anyones initials itself, the pages do show who 'colored' the art. 

That information is completely uninteresting to the original artist.

<snip>
> We can't all be perfect, we try our best to give credit where it is deserved,
> but its not going to always happen. 

As I mentioned already, this is not the first time.

> However, it is not theft.  The actual image
> for mirc does have the initials

The actual image that appears on the web does not.

> and no art will be displayed that doesn't get credit. 

This link leads to a picture that is displayed without credit:

http://www.mirc-rainbow.com/ecards/cards/romantic_1.gif

(Surely *three weeks* is enough to put initials on 52 pictures?! Yet
only half of them have been fixed!)

> I realize I am not making this any better, but I don't have any perfect
> answers and I am not planning to pull the art just because someone might think
> "I stole it".  I didn't.  I don't consider showing it on the web as stolen
> art... credit or not.. I know that the art that is played in mirc has the
> credit, and thats really where it counts, since the only place people can play
> the actual art is in mirc itself.  All they can do on the web is enjoy it.

Huh? Surely the publically accessible World Wide Web counts at least as
much as your little chat room?! And *where* is the difference between
"playing the actual art" and (only?) "enjoying it", from the
readers'/audience's" point of view? The individual pixels that appear on
the viewer's screen has the same colour values in both versions! (I.e.
to a human eye they are identical!)

> I sincerely doubt that many cards were sent,

That is irrelevant. At least one person did see them, and reacted. The
polite thing to do in that situation is to either add the credits or
remove the pictures from the web.

<snip>
> The point here really is, that we are doing our best to insure everyone gets
> credit,

Then "your best" is not good enough, or you wouldn't keep getting
criticised for it.

> I have links to many ascii art sites on my site, I make people aware
> that the art itself is not always the artist who colored it, I do not personally
> try to take credit for any of it, nor do I let the color artist take full
> credit. 

Proof of the opposite:

http://www.mirc-rainbow.com/ecards/cards/romantic_1.gif

> When you capture the image from mirc, you can't see the initials, all
> you have to go by is the "show file image" which in 99.9% of all cases has the
> initials hidden under the art. 

And the people in this newsgroup (the same people who create many of
those images you like so much) keep telling you that that is just not
good enough. You can "hide" your own initials for the sake of
prettiness. That's OK, but when you do it to somebody else's pictures
it's *rude*.

<snip>

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