For completeness, I am talking about this particular kickstarter – School Idol Tomodachi. They’re just two folks doing it like it’s 1999, and are operating with a minimal regard to copyright at least as per my interpretation. You can make your own interpretation, as I’m posting the Q&A I have submitted. Or rather, what I PM’d them on KS:
Is this licensed by klab or bushiroad? Do you have permission?
Deby & Engil says:
Hi!
Though we never talked to them directly nor got an official authorization from them, we know that they are aware of the existence of this website and tolerate it, as they tolerate fan sites since it helps them grow their users base.
Every single fan site violates copyrights in a certain way, and it’s up to the license owner to sue. Most of the time, and this is the case, they consider it as “fair use” and let people do their stuff, since it’s free advertisement for them and it’s harmless.
If at some point the lisence’s owners change their mind and ask us to take the site down or close the Kickstarter, we will do it.
Hope that helps~
And it does. Thank you.
I don’t really have a bone with the concept behind it, but it still rubs me the wrong way when someone promotes his or her own project by selling straight-up stuff they don’t own to market it. It’s one “commercial activity” too far for this ossan. I guess there’s nothing wrong with it per se, but from a business point of view it would be weird to see a fan project go raise money when the actual commercial products the site is a fan of can’t be equally shameless. That Kickstarter (TM?) stuff still is worth something in PR money. Well, for shame tiering, there is always that Clannad Man thing as a lowest tier (that I care to signal boost). This is somewhere above that.
To an extent, too, this is largely a changing mores kind of thing. These two developers are just 23 years old. Kickstarter was a thing before they even started college, assuming they were on a standard path. Paying for your own fandom from your own pocket is getting to be passe, it seems. Of course, at the same time, crowdfunding works for fandom precisely because it enables that “country club” thing for things beyond large tracts of land for golfing. The bone I have with it is just, again, as with Kickstarters in general, the simple buyer-seller relationship that Kickstarter permits to happen in the context that has been largely reserved for traditionally memberships. That ~30% that Kickstarter and its payment processor takes out of is 30% a private fundraising via paypal will not (which is just ~3%).
At least if you kickstart a con, you can do what Otakon does… When you are kickstarting a CD album or a board game or a smartwatch, you really are just preordering. And if this fansite kickstarter kept it clean, it wouldn’t be as bad as those. But now it’s a question of “is it okay to second-hand sell loveca”? Is this a question you want to even ask in the first place? Among other things.
Another interpretation is just that these folks don’t know any better. It is not out of the question. I think Dave choosing Indiegogo is a smart move, for example. Good for you, Kawaiikochan Man.
PS.
This School Idol site publishes a public API so you can pull its card entries (among other things). It’s both hilariously bad and pretty cool at the same time. I mean, like, AWS is not cheap. It’s like one-upping a production committee by putting out your favorite light novel’s anime adaptation. Except in this case it’s code that the production committee don’t care about? And the fans are trying to sell things the committee would sell? Because, like, how else can you raise money, besides selling t-shirts with Honkers printed on it, right?
It’s not like I dislike any of this. But this is no longer about copyright as much as businesses trying to make money and how fans fill the gap in a very meta kind of way, and copyright only goes to show how inadequate it is at trying to cordon off a way to get it done. It’s entirely too weaksauce for this 21st century stuff.
Maybe Gaben should take note on this.
