Thread:CureHibiki/@comment-1515612-20191004012533/@comment-8-20191010211318

Pretty Cure Draft

Hi, I'm one of the Community Directors, and Zoe has asked me to look in on this complicated issue. I've been on Fandom for a long time (14 years!) so hope I can help out here with answering your questions

This is going to be a looong reply, because I want to try and answer as much as I possibly can. I hope you won't mind it being so long! So here we go…

Tl;dr I'm sorry, but the full songs can't stay on the wiki.

Why now? This has been going on for many years now and I cannot understand why it took so long for Fandom to even notice.

There are a lot of wikis. And we rely heavily on Admins looking after them and keeping them inside the rules. We have recently introduced a Wiki Manager system (Sayuri in your case), which we hope will increase our knowledge of larger wikis, and give them much closer help and attention.

So the quick answer is, we hadn't looked, and hadn't noticed. Once we notice, we have to act.

Is every wiki gonna have to take down their audio files too?

If they are full music files of copyrighted material, then yes. Assuming we know of the problem.

Is it that bad to share music to those who have no access to iTunes, Spotify and other sites similar to them?

It's absolutely not wrong to want to do that 🙂. I love that you wanted to share and make the best resource for your users. It's just unfortunate that copyright laws won't let you do this part of that.

since wiki never seemed to have anything against audio files for many years, I assumed that audio files was the way to go instead of just replacing YouTube videos all the time.

YouTube is an odd case. They are very careful about copyright, so where a YouTube video is used, we assume that it's not a copyright violation. Of course, if it is, it's very likely to be taken down, and that means broken videos on your pages. So we recommend that you don't use videos that are probably copyright violations, or you will likely have worse pages for your readers in the long run.

What will happen to the wiki if I refuse to delete the audio files?

We definitely don't want to damage the wiki, even though I understand you will feel that we will by insisting you remove copyrighted files. But I will be blunt - if users break the Terms of Use, we sometimes have to ban them. I very much don't want to do that!

If these audio files must be deleted, then what do you recommend we do so we can give Precure fans access to the music?

I don't know what will be the right places for you, but things like Spotify and iTunes are a good start. I understand that not all the music is available any more though, which means that it's likely the only versions you can find will be illegal download sites. We can't allow links to them either.

If there is no alternative solution to replace audio files that follows the fair use law, then is there any way I can actually keep the audio files? My brother mentioned buying them and getting permission from the actual people who wrote the music but...that just sounds impossible.

You can replace them with snippets of the files, although I understand that that isn't ideal.

Getting permission is the only other option, but I agree that would be very hard. We are working at contacts from the anime world, although that's not something we can do for all topics.

so many other wikis do it as well. And I don't want to delete our files if the other wikis can get away with it.

In my experience, very few wikis upload full versions of songs. But we always look in to at any that do so, if we know of them. Overall, this is not a common problem.

About download links, I will hunt down any that has been posted and will delete them!!!!

Thank you!

the .ogg player found on wikia provides a download button: we don't. We don't want a download button. We just want people to be able to hear it, not "have" it. Remove the DL button on the ogg option and it should be ok.

Whether a file is downloadable is not a factor in whether it's copyrighted. Just being on the site is enough. We provide the means to download audio, but that doesn't mean that all audio is acceptable.

We do not make money of this. Copyright infringement takes place when money is made of their product when they still make money off of it and neither of this happens.

I'm afraid that's not true. You don't need to sell or make a profit from copyrighted material to be in violation of copyright laws. Even if the work is not available anywhere else, and the original company/artist is not making money out of it, it's still copyrighted.

We also use Screenshots and toei's promotional material. Are these going to have to go too? This is why Wika is better than wikapedia proper…

This is where "fair use" does apply. As long as the wiki isn't just for screenshots, they are generally okay. However, we may have to remove them if the copyright owner asks us to. Promotional material is meant to be used by other people, so they are generally okay too. There are usually terms of use for using them, which will be on the copyright owner's site.

Note that I'm using "generally" a lot, that's because this is such a complicated subject and there are always special cases - as in the case I mentioned above of the copyright holder asking us to take something down.

Maybe you could talk to their other fandom staff and have the audio file's download feature be taken away? That way we (fandom as a whole) won't be violating any laws

As above, I'm afraid it doesn't work that way 😕

Plus, as a fandom, I'm sure we want to give everyone as much information as we can give, and letting people hear music is just as important as writing down information about a series

I absolutely understand this, and wish copyright worked differently!

I don't know whether I want to delete them until you do a worldwide wikia annoucement about the audio files because every other wiki has them too

This is an unusual case, the vast majority of wikis don't upload full files, so an announcement wouldn't be appropriate.

Fandom always toes the fair use line of copyright, so all those articles we write describing the things happening in the show should also be removed if we're splitting hairs like this.

This is an important one. It's not outside of copyright laws to write about a topic. You can write as much as you like about a painting, but still not be allowed to copy that painting. The same applies here, writing about Pretty Cure and the things that happen in the show is just fine. However, the writing has to be original (not copied from elsewhere).

Quotes and other small excerpts from the script are also fine under fair use (like small samples of the music), but full scripts are also a copyright issue.

And that is the very thing that makes wikia famous - our hard, unpaid work.

100%. This is a wonderful wiki and you have all done a wonderful job of making it what it is.

The suggestion to put up YouTube videos seems more of a "we put it into another person's hands and then it's their problem".

Honestly, yes. We rely on YouTube's strong copyright stance to look out for problems there.

Some other points:

The rules about copyright are in the Terms of Use and the Community Creation Policy. Linking to illegal (including copyrighted) content is also mentioned on the Fandom Community Guidelines.

On the samples of the music that you can allow - I suggest 30 seconds is the length to aim for. This is the length that Wikipedia allows, and they are very knowledgeable about what is reasonable under fair use.