OF COURSE YOU CAN DMCA SOMEONE BECAUSE YOU DONT LIKE THEM

@sword I'm glad we're in agreement that Hussie wants control over his fans.

Thank you for sharing.

@dingus not sure i get your point here w "The UHC wasn't blown up because of any copyright violations". isn't the fact that hussie didn't jump to the C&D immediately a good thing, regarding claims that they're overly litigious and a bully with the law? they contacted gio because they wanted to make an official homestuck collection, and considering gio had basically made that just unofficially, it was a good opportunity for a collab. when gio didn't want to work with them, they then C&D'd them. because not working with them meant they didn't have the rights to host the asset pack. like... that seems like a reasonable response to the new information they got from the negotiation? gio acknowledged from the start that the UHC didn't have the legal right to exist, and then it turned out he didn't agree with the terms for hussie Giving it that right. hence C&D. like, you can disagree with the terms as hussie set them, but they're kind of basic in the sense that 'you can't just say whatever you want about me' is a thing a lot of companies request before/upon hiring.

also just wanna +1 what @sword said. fans don't have the 'right' to a creator's stamp of approval, or to make money off of that work in a way that isn't inherently transformative. and a stamp of approval isn't even what the FRAF is, for another thing! as far as cami's been saying hussie isn't even involved in picking the 'select few', so what's the actual problem?

@timeisrestored I think the big problem is that, yes, from a distance what Hussie did wasn't wrong, which is why he has the legal advantage at all. The issue comes down to the details of how the proceedings went, and the fact that Hussie's goal from the start seems to have been to also take the opportunity to get Gio to take down his articles.

@Palm, well yes? The correction of the articles was of course going to be a requirement for them to collaborate. Why would Hussie co-sign and officially partner with someone who was spreading (even in just their opinion) misinformation about them and other partners they've worked with?

I don't know what happened but I pressed some key on my keyboard and my last reply was sent by itself. I didn't finish writing lol.

The point I was trying to make is that if it is true that getting Gio to take down the articles was always part of their motives, that means the issue was never with the question of Gio not having the rights to host the collection, but with all the other drama involved in the matter, which is why the legal threats were a shitty move. Hussie was using the UHC as a bargain chip to get other things that didn't need to be a part of the negotiation. I can understand why they'd want it, I just think it's shitty of them to try and make it a part of the negotiations.

You already say "as part of negotiations," but are upset that Hussie actually was... negotiating? Like actually wanting something in return for giving something HUGE to Gio?

If I was someone working with Hussie and I then see them start working with someone who has actively participated in a hate and harassment campaign against me.... everyone's focusing on poor little Gio, forgetting everyone else Hussie has and is currently working with.

@ignoblepalm i understand that perspective. for what it's worth, the reasons i don't see it that way are:

- there is no reason for the negotiations to have gone on for nearly that long if that was hussie's only goal. even if the 'bait and switch' of only bringing up the articles a decent way in was part of some master plan in boiling the frog, talks still went on a long time after that. why continue once it was clear that wasn't happening? why would the letter talking about gio deleting the articles still mention a 'working relationship'?

- a lot of the discussion around the negotiation is (duh) being lead by gio's framing of the situation. since his framing has ranged from biased (such as p blatantly pushing cami to say what he wanted to hear in their brief 'interview',) to just kind of wildly speculating (ie: vast error, saying that hussie's using NDA's to abuse people systemically when he has no evidence of that), i consider every conclusion he makes to require an absolute heaping of salt before being seriously considered. if he was leading/wrong then, why would i unquestioningly trust him here?

- also, gio's call to action at the end to make sure people stop giving their money to hs:bc + fraf (when i don't believe he had anywhere CLOSE to enough evidence to suggest hussie got enough money from the HICU or FRAF to justify endangering small creator's income like that) makes his read on the situation even shakier, because now his intentions for writing this piece directly motivate him to describe everything as negatively and dramatically as possible (such as referring to the scorpion + frog parable multiple times, insisting hussie has an obsession with 'dominating' him, likening so much of the conversation to abuse).

ive said this before, but if gio was just saying hussie was a dick/unprofessional in negotiations, i feel like very few people would contest that. but using that to extend all the way to 'hussie is the cancer at the core of homestuck that we need to cut out by starving them of any and all money + goodwill' is... extremely questionable.

last thing rn but also @sword that bit about "If I was someone working with Hussie" is so fucking real! it's not just hussie being criticised in those articles!

@timeisrestored

Gio brings this up in the article. The reason negations took so long was because they tried to isolate Bambosh and Gio. The two of them had an agreement to not sign anything without the other's knowledge, so with one half of the duo missing things deadlocked until Bambosh abandoned ship.

Again, if the goal was genuinely to take the project under Homestuck's wing, there was no need to do this. You could easily have a sit down with them both. Now, if the goal was to get legal pressure on someone you don't like... this is what you would do.

@sword That's the issue, Hussie probably didn't want to work with Gio, which I imagine is why they tried to negotiate with just Bambosh at first. When they realized things weren't working out, Bambosh quit and they had to work with Gio directly, which was against their intentions. Their mistake from my point of view was deciding at this point that they'd use the opportunity to have the articles dealt with instead of dropping the negotiations if they wanted distance from Gio so much.

I just believe that having Gio edit or take down the articles isn't nice because regardless of their content or quality, because unless they're illegal in some way it should be valid to keep them online and I understand Gio not being fine with the terms being imposed. I don't like the articles and honestly I wouldn't care all that much if they were scrubbed off in some way but I think there's other times and places Hussie could've used to discuss those with Gio.

Not that they weren't a big deal when it came to the relationship between Hussie and Gio (both personal and professional) but the problem is they chose to pretend to act as if the UHC negotiations could still work out when they saw Gio and his articles as a roadblock and were probably not so interested in going on with the licensing as much as they would've been with Bambosh.

"Like actually wanting something in return for giving something HUGE to Gio?"
If anything it'd be more correct to say "Giving something to Gio to compensate for what they wanted" because they never wanted to negotiate about the UHC with Gio in the first place.

Jesus christ it happened again. Sorry. This has to be on me. If any mod could trash my last reply I'd appreciate it. I'll just rewrite/finish it here.

@timeisrestored I agree with your second point which is why I'm trying my best to look at the facts instead of at the way Gio interpreted them. His framing however also puts into question the reason why negotiations went on for so long, so I guess you could have a point here, but they could've also lasted that long because Hussie became insistent of having Gio edit/remove the articles while Gio still pushed on with his belief that Hussie would "drop the issue", which I do think was a naive idea but also he didn't have a lot of choice since with the legal action Hussie was preparing, at that point there were no more actions he could take other than give in to Hussie's demands or wait for the C&D or DMCA or whatever was coming for him.

And yeah the call to action is shitty, I don't deny that. In fact I don't like a lot of things about the article. It's just that none of that matters to what I'm discussing because the negotiations came before he wrote that.

Hussie was never ‘holding back his lawyers’. lawyers are paid to enact their clients wishes. hussies lawyer would not be chomping at the bit for a DMCA if Hussie was not paying him to investigate a copyright claim to begin with. Hussie spent years advertising the UHC on social media as the best way to read homestuck and his lawyer was not insisting he remove it that entire time.

"I just believe that having Gio edit or take down the articles isn't nice"

..... "nice?" Honestly I think Hussie should could have been a lot less nice, with what Gio has done in the past. A lot of people are acting as if Gio is a neutral party here.

But you're also saying the point itself. They wanted to work with Bambosh, who actually made the initial thing. It's far more Bambosh's than Gio's imo. Bambosh wasn't the one pointing fingers at other members of Hussie's team. If they HAD to work with Gio, then of course they were going to have stipulations.

Even "could've also lasted that long because Hussie became insistent of having Gio edit/remove the articles while Gio still pushed on with his belief that Hussie would "drop the issue"" - yes Hussie would be insistent on their condition to work with Gio being met. Just like Gio was insistent on not meeting that condition. So they just couldn't come to an agreement, which happens! But Gio acting like he's a victim and as @timeisrestored said, trying to get people to not give money to HSBC/FRAF (which I'll emphasize, ONCE AGAIN is Gio attacking people who work with or are affiliated with Hussie when he's unable to reach Hussie themself) is indicative of how Gio has to churn this up into his "scorpion and frog" analogy, instead of just facing the facts. If you're reliant on someone else's goodwill, maybe understand that you shouldn't be targeting their co-workers!

my current stance is that gios "article" is a callout post and as such inherently not trustworthy
too often have those been made in excrutiatingly bad faith or even fabricated entirely
especially when aimed at marginalised people
(i dont like calling this transmisogyny bc to my knowledge hussie has never claimed trans womanhood (or even transfeminity?) explicitly and as an nb i honestly find the TMA TME thing often enbyphobic, at least how its used)
(no i do not want to argue about that)

however since my understanding is that there indeed is a stained history on hussies end on management and behaviour (i came to the fandom somewhat late so its grapevine only, so i am not married to this information)
i dont feel comfortable to look at the situation uncritically

which is why i would LIKE an official statement and more information

however i also think that we are not owed this and i could not fault [Homestuck] (whatever form that takes) if they choose not to do that

if there is truth in gios recount then i would say that was indeed not hussie playing nice
but neither has gio been and given both of their history i can fully understand that neither of them did

i think hussie is fully within her rights to pursue legal action about their work
i also understand if that is seen as kind of a dick-move

but i do also find it sorta silly to use that to call hussie and miles abusers

PS: the argument ive seen that a non-adressment shows guilt is flawed as hell

and the argument that other people are only not talking about things due to NDAs and that shows guilt even more so
bc while yes, accounts of mistreatment could very well be prevented from being shared per NDA, so could accounts to disprove gios arguments
bc if noone may talk about it then gio can just as much make shit up without talkbacks

-------------------------

ultimately i just think that its not productive to spin in circles on this whole drama bc we simply do not have the full, unbiased picture

@sword

You're proving Gio's point again. No clue why you keep doing this when it seems like that's not what you want to say.

The problem with Gio is that he criticized Hussie, and those criticisms dealt a serious blow to Hussie's reputation... because he was right. Gio was right. Let's face facts.

Hussie then got a chance to make that guy's life just a little more miserable and he took it. There's something about an eye for an eye making the world blind here.

also like... people can change their mind, and hussie/miles and gio did not have the "we wont pursue legal action" as a written and notarised contract

if the reenacted screenshots are true then i would interpret that part as "we dont want to/dont plant to pursue legal action" anyways

Ultimately these exposés proved to be the hill that both Gio and Homestuck were willing to let the officialization of the UHC die on. Neither is being wholly truthful about doing "everything they could to make this work", because if that were true, someone would have let go of the stupid fucking things.

The reason that I lean toward Gio despite not liking him is because I can't both-sides this. I believe some amount of stuff in his articles is true, maybe not all, but enough that if someone is thinking about working for Hussie, they deserve to know what went down. I care about that a lot more than Hussie being comfy with the ordeal and maybe having their image challenged less, which as far as I can tell is the only benefit taking them down would have. Even then, those effects would only occur a while later, because the takedown would be news on its own. I mean come on, you don't think Makin would write his own speculative Reddit post about that?

That's what made me so mad that I briefly removed all presence Homestuck had on my socials when i first read the article. What the fuck was so important about the articles to these people?

Gio has no reservations here; The articles are a public good exposing an abusive company whose work is still ongoing, thus the abuses may be as well. If he fully believes that, of course he'd value that over the UHC. It's exactly as I said above, if this is a real trend in how they operate, which to some extent I think it almost-undeniably was (and maybe still is), people should know about it.

Homestuck's situation is less-certain; If they believe the articles are misinformed and caused some damage, that sucks, but not making him trash them doesn't cause more damage. Only new articles or spreading them around does that, and I think "don't shittalk us publicly" is at least normal in a contract. Having Gio onboard at all would give them (read: people who defend them online) an excuse to present the exposés as dated. Like, "maybe some of that was true, but things changed! The writer WORKS for Hussie!".

I just don't know why not being able to burn these things was the end of the world. It's not like people were actively throwing them around all the time, mostly people just wanted to be reassured that Hiveswap act 3 is still coming out, even on Reddit.

Oh yeah, we're getting that reassurance in October. God, Fall is going to be so fucking weird for this franchise.

Once again you're accepting Gio's premise and Gio's centricity. Saying that the articles was worth "the end of the world" on either side is only true for Gio. Those articles, being able to saying he had "exposé" and claim to be a "journalist" was everything to Gio. They were not everything to Hussie. Hussie owns their own work. Hussie knows more than any of us the stage of the site being back up even with VIZ's bullshit. With it coming back very soon as multiple people working on it have said, then of course the UHC not going to be as important for Hussie as it would be for Hussie to protect his employees (not even talking about WP, there were a LOT of things in that blog post and Sarah Z's video from Gio's "information").

If the UHC goes down, then Hussie takes a temporary hit while the site is still being worked on, but was able to stand their ground in not tacitly endorsing abuse (or "speculation") to their employees. I think it's quite reasonable, even honorable, for Hussie to prioritize the security of their friends and collaborators.

I see Gio's boys club is still at it