Saria wrote:
[...]
I know you say that it can be hard to tell because some features are commonly shared - like eye colour - but I know theft was the case because it was my own writing, my own work. It almost perfectly word for word except minor changes such as name, and one word was changed to be a misspelling.
[...]
So yeah...that's my experience. Not all character thieves will bother trying to get to know characters - most will steal your work that you may have spent years on, then alter a few details to try and throw off the trail and then utterly mess up their characterisation, all because they liked a form you wrote and wanted to claim they wrote it. I can't say I understand the mindset myself, but there are those out there who will steal without investing time in learning the character.
Thank you for sharing. I'm very sorry to hear that something like this happened to you. People who are roleplayers themselves should have some understanding of what a character means to their player and it is really unsettling to think that there are still some who would deliberately steal someone elses work like that. And have the guts to repeat the process on another website at that.
Perhaps the people who really need some consciousness raising about this kind of thing are the admins of the forums where that kind of thing happens.
While what you are describing is clearly a case of theft, and not a harmless one, I'm still hesitant to call it character theft though. I take it that the fact that this character of yours was taken was the worst part for you, but what made it possible for you to prove that this person had taken it from you, was that they'd directly copied your writing. There is clearly a case of plain old plagiarism involved here and I wonder if this person would have been able to pull off the character theft without plagiarizing at all. Clearly they wouldn't have been able to play the character while keeping them in character, right? Would they have been able to write up a form describing your character in enough detail to really characterize them without copying your writing?
TheXDarkXDragoness wrote:First off I'd also like to say that MLP, SAO, and other widely distributed things are generally considered free, and they are there for that. But as far as characters being similar, you can't take a deviantART artist character because it looks similar because that art simply belongs to that character, making it character theft tall over again. It is a very complex thing, but imagine the number of victims there are EVERY DAY. People who put hours into each character or piece of art, every photographer who paid a lot of money to be able to take that award-winning shot. Once one person takes it, another person who liked it may use it too until it is virtually unstoppable and you have lost all of that hard work for nothing. What then?
I don't really understand what you're saying here. Would you mind clarifying? Are you saying that MLP, as in My Little Pony, the tv show, is considered free, because it's widely distributed, but some random person's character art is not?
As a matter of fact, all of those widely distributed things, inculding all tv shows, video games and books are usually trademarked and a trademark makes using these things a whole lot more problematic than copyright alone would. The companies holding the trademark will usually encourage fanworks of course. You don't go around suing your fans anyway, it's bad style and bad for business. That doesn't mean that everything being done there is ok though. People selling Pokemon fanart commissions (I've seen that happen on DA a lot) is cleary commercial use and that is not quite legal.
There have been cases of artists being extremely protective of their characters and ready to sue their fans as well. I remember a warning being issued on a fantasy gallery site several years ago, concerning the works of Anne McCaffrey. All illustrations of characters or creatures from her books had to be clearly labeled as fanart and appended with a certain kind of copyright notice. See
here for the homepage of an artist who was supposedly in contact with the lady's lawyer.
Is the point you're trying to make a moral one? Do you believe that somehow the small artist has more of a personal connection to their character that is more worthy of protection than it would be, if it were commercially distributed?