OF COURSE YOU CAN DMCA SOMEONE BECAUSE YOU DONT LIKE THEM

Gio defender being shit to transfem teens?? I am shocked

there’s a polite way and an impolite way to enforce copyright ownership.

the polite way is, when you learn about unacceptable copyright infringement occurring, you send a takedown request or a DMCA notice.

the impolite way is that you first post on social media that you approve of the alleged copyright infringment and advertise it as the best way to read your work, then reach out to the infringers years later telling them you’re interested in collaborating and don’t intend to enforce any legal threats, then go back on what you said and threaten a DMCA to try and rehash old internet drama from five years ago.

man this is so embarrassing for you if you aren't gio

What's the polite way to deal with harassing someone you work with personally into leaving the internet?

the my immortal reference is some gossip blogger type shit

I don’t think it was ever proven that they wrote my immortal, but they’re still a national treasure. at some point I want to make myself a proper MCR / Gerard way signature so I can really feel like it’s 2005 again

would just like to say yeah, to all of this lol. the idea that hussie should have no say over who hosts xeir work or how xe does so makes no sense to me. if xe was doing this shit with fanfic authors ('you were mean to me on tumblr dot com so im nuking ur 300k fic from orbit') then it WOULD be a completely different ballgame, which is why i assume gio tries to draw so many comparisons between this and that. but like. until this situation actually BECOMES that one so much of the commentary around it makes NO sense. actual fearmongering for no reason lol

guh, I would have a lot more to say but I am ass at writing stuff today but I do pretty much agree with @spicyyeti's statement

This thread is some next level glazing. We're past the point of consumption on this one.

Muscling your fans around with legal threats to get them to delete criticism of you is bad, actually.

I've yet to hear anything that really disproves anything Gio has said outside of vibes. The last time Andrew tried to disprove Gio he just wound up showing his whole ass and proved him right all along, lmao.

I mean if the complaint is "Gio's prose is a little overdramatic" then I hate to remind everyone that this is a Homestuck forum. I'm assuming we all read the same comic, here.

Andrew Hussie is not some poor struggling artist just barely making ends meet. He's clearly got plenty of lawyer money. Not so much "fix website" money, I guess. Dude even has a solid shake of his comic being picked up for an animated series in like... what a month?

Will we be taking a valiant stand against the desecrators of Nintendo's copyright for committing the grave sin of emulation or homebrewing your Switch next?

Honestly I gotta agree with Dingus here. I don't like Gio either but, if all Gio said was true (at least in regards to how the legal threats happened) then Hussie needs to address the shit he did to him and Bambosh too. Going back and forth on legal threats is a dishonest move when they could've just issued the DMCA right away and you gotta remember Bambosh got caught in the crossfire too, which I assume we all agree is unfortunate.

@Dingus we've already heard multiple FRAF members outright disprove Gio's framing and "suspicions." like just off the top of my head Austin from Vast Error being supposedly ousted by Hussie when VE got added.

It's also burying the lede heavily to say the issue is "Muscling your fans around with legal threats to get them to delete criticism of you," when it's actually "Stopped letting a fan break the law that any other creator/company would have just sent a DMCA a Long Time Ago." It's "Tried to negotiate with someone who's had a history of acting in bad faith to do THEM a favor when they should have just sent the DMCA, apparently."

Gio wants to act like he's an authority and his voice is important/affiliated? Okay, then that means what he says and how he acts has consequences. I think a lot of fans are mostly worried about Hussie going after them or Homestuck.net or something (because we already know that they're not going after actual fan work and NEVER HAS) because they imagine that hosting a download of someone else's work is the coolest thing they'll ever do, not realizing that they're already setting themselves up for failure. Independent artists get to protect their own work. If it's so outrageous to you that they wanted to try and offer an alternative, I'm sure that next time Hussie is just going to listen to their lawyer and send the DMCA and not bother reaching out to JOIN THEIR COLLECTIVE (gio played himself so hard lmao), so you're in luck!

Sorry for doubleposting but I forgot to add: I know Gio might not have been acting with the best intent either in which case Hussie's position makes some more sense but it still seems odd to me that they'd keep getting their lawyers ready for legal action when negotiations were supposedly still ongoing, unless that's common practice and I'm unaware of the fact. Still, I'm not going to say that the fault is entirely on one side, it seems to me that both sides were stalling for their own reasons and neither really contributed to anything with it.

andrew Hussie, going by the logs, is not a good negotiator. typically NDAs given out are not so generalized and aren’t asked to be signed one at a time, and licenses are allowed to be read before they are signed. good faith negotiators also generally don’t open by saying they aren’t interested in legal threats and then say shit like “I have to hold back my lawyer on this”. good faith negotiations also would have left the Hiveswap articles out of the conversation entirely and not continued to threaten legal action after the asset pack was removed.

@sword You can just tell me you didn't read the article. OP hasn't. The UHC wasn't blown up because of any copyright violations. If that was the case, why wait years to do it? It didn't just fall out of the sky overnight.

I agree with Gio's belief that Hussie just wants control. Over his fans, over his fandom, and over his critics. This show shouldn't be running on contingent, in my opinion. Why do we even have this strange bureaucracy around fans monetizing fanworks, anyway?

You're right - Hussie is not a good negotiator.... because they're an artist. They're deliberately going against their lawyer's advice to try and do something nice, so of course it's not going to be standard. They WERE holding their lawyer back! They were being very upfront as to what the situation was! You're upset that apparently Hussie wasn't forthcoming enough but also upset at every piece of information that was shared about the overall situation? What exactly do you know about what's "usual" for NDAs in the arts industry - we all know that you at least aren't an artist. As someone who HAS been brought in on several projects... it actually is pretty normal! Gio didn't like them because he's not a real creator, he's a fandom blogger, which means that his trade is gossip and second-hand information. What he finds actually valuable is what information he can get from other people, so yes he would naturally have issues with an NDA (that is vital when dealing with someone you know is a leaky faucet already) that apparently every other member of FRAF/HICU didn't!

Preventing fans from selling merchandise based on intellectual properties isn't uncommon at all, is it?

@Dingus come on lmao "If that was the case, why wait years to do it?" - it's already been established that Hussie was allowing it and promoting it as the VIZ site was down (and, frankly, Bambosh was the face of UHC at the beginning, I didn't even know Gio was involved until this whole thing). The site is still down, but clearly they've been able to wrestle back control and is in the process of getting it working again. At least one person working on the site has said that they think it'll be up in the near future and VIZ left a MESS.

It's also interesting that you consider "control over fans and fandom" as... letting people host your work on their own websites... letting people create brands around distributing your work while talking shit. this is one dude who's been a problem and bad actor since 2019. I don't know if you were there but people who saw the shit he pulled then know better than to believe him now.

If you want to be a critic and gossip blog, maybe don't also be reliant on them letting you break the law!

@ignoblepalm Yeah. That is what most companies usually do. That was also was how What Pumpkin used to operate.

That doesn't seem to be the world we're in now. If pushing it off to the fans is the dream (as what seems to be the goal with the rhetoric behind post canon), why is it only a select few?

Personally I'd love to see Hussie put his money where his mouth is on this.

"how DARE this author curate licensing agreements!" do you hear yourself? if anything all this and so much entitled fan behavior has been indicative of exactly how much things need to be reigned in.