Counter proposal: ban OP from this community along with anyone else who removes artist trademarks from comics they post.
Comic Strips
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
Rules
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π Be Nice!
- Treat others with respect and dignity. Friendly banter is okay, as long as it is mutual; keyword: friendly.
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ποΈ Community Standards
- Comics should be a full story, from start to finish, in one post.
- Posts should be safe and enjoyable by the majority of community members, both here on lemmy.world and other instances.
- Any comic that would qualify as raunchy, lewd, or otherwise draw unwanted attention by nosy coworkers, spouses, or family members should be tagged as NSFW.
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𧬠Keep it Real
- Comics should be made and posted by real human beans, not by automated means like bots or AI. This is not the community for that sort of thing.
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π½οΈ Credit Where Credit is Due
- Comics should include the original attribution to the artist(s) involved, and be unmodified. Bonus points if you include a link back to their website. When in doubt, use a reverse image search to try to find the original version. Repeat offenders will have their posts removed, be temporarily banned from posting, or if all else fails, be permanently banned from posting.
- Attributions include, but are not limited to, watermarks, links, or other text or imagery that artists add to their comics to use for identification purposes. If you find a comic without any such markings, it would be a good idea to see if you can find an original version. If one cannot be found, say so and ask the community for help!
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π Post Formatting
- Post an image, gallery, or link to a specific comic hosted on another site; e.g., the author's website.
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- When linking to a comic hosted on another site, ensure the link is to the comic itself and not just to the website; e.g.,
β Correct: https://xkcd.com/386/
β Incorrect: https://xkcd.com/
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π¬ Post Frequency/SPAM
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SΓ, por favor [Spanish/EspaΓ±ol]
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Web Accessibility
Note: This is not a rule, but a helpful suggestion.
When posting images, you should strive to add alt-text for screen readers to use to describe the image you're posting:
Another helpful thing to do is to provide a transcription of the text in your images, as well as brief descriptions of what's going on. (example)
Web of Links
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world: "I use Arch btw"
- !memes@lemmy.world: memes (you don't say!)
I'm going to block beep, but they should 100% be banned for being a worthless piece of shit.
Watermarks protect the actual creator's stuff from people claiming it as their own work. This is a dumb idea.

This is hands down the most brain dead take I've seen today. Congratulations, you're wrong more than anyone else! π
If I enjoy a creator, I want to see more of their work.
With people like you, I would have no idea who Neil Kohney even is.
Fuck you in particular.
OP, do you have some kind of humiliation fetish or why is your take this shit?
Do you think that a painter's signature on a painting is an ad? If I listen to music and the artist states their name, is that an ad? All of these are just a way of saying "I made this". They aren't ads in any meaningful sense of the word.
Bro be like "ew, an ad":

Literally unbearable to look at with that eyesore in the bottom right corner:

While we could enforce the rule of link being the attribution, as a general rule it's not what will happen when someone shares anything on the Internet. It will be ripped out of context and posted on random places with zero attribution.
Exhibit A: yourself. Your post history does only occasionally contain links.
You recommend linking to the source instead of a signature, but you don't include either in your posts. When someone makes something, they have a right to have people know they are the ones who made it. You should be banned from every community you refuse to credit artists in. You are actively harming this community.
You are against capitalism, and your approach is to remove author attribution, thus fucking small creators. That's called punching down, and for being so against capitalism, you operate like a good dog.
What a terrible idea.
What I'm hearing is that you don't want to support the creators who's work you repost here.
I don't agree. These types of ads are the few that I'm actually okay with. because it's an artist trying to support themselves, not a corporate schill using AI or trying to push a big corp.
The War and Peas comics artis has a patreon. I can't afford to support them directly but I do want them to receive support.
Why don't you want artists to get paid for their work?
Maybe you should abide by the two posts per person per day rule before you start trying to create new ones.
But do go on and tell everyone how an artist having their name and/or their webcomic's name included in the image is an advertisement.
Especially when it's damn obvious that you're using AI to remove the attribution when you can't just crop it out. Not just a weasel, but a lazy one at that.
Artist attribution β Ads
For fucks sake, why you acting like every comic comes with a red "30% off" banner?
Aren't most of them just a handle or name in the margin? Seems ridiculous to think it ruins your experience somehow. You're just being actively hostile to artists for some reason.
So, upon reading further, this is not about watermarks over the content, you are just mad artists sign their work... you haven't realized yet, but you are a douchebag. My vote is to just ban whoever crops out artist names (or post an image without it and don't attribute in the title or comments) because that's a douchebag thing to do. If you hate authors just ask ChatGPT to make you comics, those won't be signed.
Easily one of the worst takes Iβve ever seen.
yeah I remember when they gave me a contract i put my watermark on with an ad of my brand (sometimes called full name).
idiot.
Better idea, how about a rule to ban people who intentionally remove them?
We'd get better content, and nothing of value would be lost. Least of which is AI slop to remove water marks
Most mp3s have the artist name in the metadata or title. And, even the most rudimentary platforms show this information front and center. It is not an ad. It is a feature we desire. We want to know who made it, so that we can understand its context, its subtexts, and yes, find the artist for more of their work.
Image files typically do not make use of these mechanisms, and certainly the platforms we view them on rarely do. The general convention is to 'sign' or watermark it instead.
It is as simple as that. To remove the signature of a webcomic is like stripping an mp3 of all metadata and making the filename a random string. It's fundamentally an inconvenience to everyone involved. No one wants this.
(This is not to mention that the wholesale removal of attribution and complete divorce of creator and creation serves the ultimate goals of corporations. They've done it with food (where does your milk come from), furniture (who made your chair), and now with art (who made this comic?))
The vast standard is music ships with the artist's name baked into the metadata. It's watermarked that way, kept in the fringes of the data, away from the main piece, just like a signature on the fringes of the artpiece. This is not new, nearly every artist does it. That's often why we can ID physical art centuries later, and it's why you rarely ever stumble into a song file you can't identify the artist of.
How is the post about not cropping the artists signature relevant here?
Is the front cover of a book an ad? Are the credits at the end of a movie an ad?
If a signature is an ad, what is it advertising for exactly? Can you define the word "ad" for us? Imagine hating ads so much and literally not knowing what they are.
Do you have some examples of βadsβ or watermarks in comics?
IMO artist signatures/names or comic titles are not ads.
Are you puppeting your bot account right now so that you can evade a ban?
Genuinely asking because this is just like. The worst take ever, but the time frame between the number of posts you post per day and the fact that there was a post recently about bots not being allowed all make me suspect everything you've said.
Do you think seeing the author's name on the front of a book is also an ad?
I am with you and also thin we should visit every existing museum and remove the signature from the Artists!!
The sign inside the museum should be enough! Why did we paid for the museum in the first place if we see "Artist ads" like signatures?
... Isn't supporting and highlighting smaller creators rather than huge megacorps kinda a core part of the anti-capitalist movement?
At the end, music don't have watermarks
You don't listen to hip hop. They have producer tags, and I think some electronic musicians might do it too.
Did the copyright holder (i.e. the artist) give you permission to redistribute their work without attribution? If not, it's a copyright validation and illegal in most countries.
I'm not really against pirating (you would copy a car), if you are taking from the rich. But that's not the case here.
And holding back information about the source of the comic is just evil to the readers here.