I'd like to contact Egarashinai via pixiv mail and gain closure on this entire scenario with his art work once and for all. He's my favorite artist and I honestly feel like having him black listed from a site that represents something he seems to love is completely wrong.

I want to know why things turned out like this but as many of you know I'm unable any kind of Japanese. So may I make a shameless request of some of the more bilingual members of this site and ask if you guys will reverse translate my letter?

Not to be a negative nancy, but i really doubt that will work. Some artists get weird about their stuff being reposted (no judgment, it's their work after all), and this is exacerbated by the language barrier.

Plus you have to imagine artists like them get a lot of pleas in broken Japanese to begin with (and while i can translate in the one direction pretty well, i could pen something legible but amateurish in the other direction).

For whatever reason this causes me to recall Naruhodo (who does a lot of Naruto doujins, fittingly), and his pleas in broken english on e-hentai to have them stop stealing his stuff off of dlsite. Even proved it was him by editing his website. e-hentai admins never budged.

An amusing situation seeing the shoe on the other foot.

I see it is disappointing as I had finally managed to pay for translations to for his various images. Maybe I'll just upload them here and people can see them with association to the various image number.

Is he blacklisted on e-hentai? Could put them up there.

This.

As Ogodei has said there are quite a few artists that don't want their art to be reposted for whatever reason, including e.g. western ones like Rosvo as well. You'd have better changes to talk Rosvo into allowing us to upload his stuff (he does speak English after all) than Japanese artists ... and I honestly highly doubt you could even convince Rosvo let alone Egarashinai. Just upload yer stuff on e-hentai and drop a link here, problem solved ^^.

Or maybe don't piss off the mods by being so blatantly obvious about getting around the do-not-post policy.

My understanding is that most of the DNP stuff is kept off here even in the total absence of any credible threat of legal action (or even credible threat of marginally-credible legal threat). For example I doubt many Japanese artists are going to bother trying to get a takedown on a website that I presume is probably hosted in the US. That content is kept off of hypnohub out of a respect for the artists. It's not to protect hypnohub, it's to be a respectable community of honorable people.

You are still breaking the spirit of this site's policy by just uploading on another site and swapping around links here in the forums. If you're this open about it to the point where you can't even plead ignorance, you shouldn't be surprised if a mod comes down on you.

I may no longer be a mod, but I seriously doubt the current mods would object to this. We usually don't like linking to pirated material, but if it's just images you can find elsewhere on the net (like on the artist's pixiv, in this instance), then we never had a problem with linking to it. We keep our pledge to not host any of the artist's images and prevent them from being uploaded in the future, but linking to them in other locations isn't really damaging to that agreement. If the artist wants their art taken down from that site as well, they have to go through that site's admins.

This reminds me of a story.

A few years ago, there was a particular Japanese game which I played. There was a small but dedicated group of people who played this game, but it was very hard to gain access to any of the mods for the game because they were always posted on this Japanese site which password protected everything, and had everything listed in Japanese.

Well, I don't speak much Japanese (and I can't read a lick of Kanji), but I figured I knew more than most of the English community did, and my knowledge of the game's subject matter was pretty vast, so I decided to go in and examine every single mod on the website and download anything I could and bundle it up in a friendly pack for my fellow English players to use, with English file names (where I could identify them).

The thing was, as I said, the files were password protected... but they weren't protected well. Some people would straight up put the passwords in the description of the file (password protection was mandatory), while others would make a sort of anti-Gaijin barrier by linking to their blog or a Nicovideo preview of the mod and put the password there.

So with a little Google Translate magic, minor knowledge of Hiragana/Katakana and a Nicovideo account, I was able to procure most of the passwords to download the mods.

This was all in good intentions, mind you. I never claimed ownership of any of these mods (in fact, I outright stated in the readme for the bundle that I was not in any way responsible for any of them and all credit goes to their creators) and I figured, hey, they're available for free, with passwords easily accessible, what right do they have to ever complain about me rehosting these mods for people who otherwise would not be able to access them?

So for a while, this went on without issue. Until one day, I decided to send an email to one of the mod creators. It was a technical question on the creation of the mods, and since he was one of my favorites, I decided to ask him. I sent it in English with a Google Translated Japanese text below it, and apologized if it was hard to read. I offhand mentioned my involvement in this mod bundle during the message.

His response however was none too friendly.

He spoke (somewhat iffy) English, and he told me that I was a criminal. I was violating Japanese law and was a pirate and content thief. I was stealing their mods without permission and I must cease this immediately, remove the bundle from the internet and delete all of the mod files from my computer.

My response was more or less "Dude are you fucking joking?"

I explained to him that I was no thief, and claimed no ownership of any of these mods, and that he had no right to complain, considering that he especially was one of the people who posted the password in the file description right there on the website.

He said it didn't matter. He once again demanded that I delete all of the files. I told him no, I wasn't going to, and I wasn't going to stop downloading the mods and updating the bundle either. There was a small but dedicated English community for this game and I was their only option for gaining access to any of these mods. I wasn't going to leave them out in the cold.

Then he started to get straight up racist. He told me that the mods were only for Japanese people, and only for use in Japan. He said that the community did not want foreigners using these mods and that's why the passwords were there in the first place, to prevent foreigners from downloading them. I pretty much told him I gave no fucks and that he was a racist asshole. He responded by straight up calling me a "nigger shit" (for the record, I'm white).

So I kept doing what I was doing, and a few days later released the next version of the bundle. He then sent me another email saying that he warned me and now he was going to take action.

Luckily it wasn't legal action, I suppose. But rather, now there was a big red message at the top of the mod site, which Google Translated to something along the lines of "hide your passwords better. Foreigners are stealing our mods."

Passwords vanished from the file descriptions. Now getting the passwords was like walking through a maze. The descriptions would lead to Nicovideo, and in the video there would be a scrolling text URL to their website, and on their website there would be a link to another website, which would have the password on it. In some cases, the linked text wouldn't actually be the password, but would be something like "The name of the main character of the show this mod is from."

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!

About a week later, there was another update to the mod bundle with a dozen new mods, all from the latest batch of well-hidden-password files.

I received another email. This one only said "Stop." in it. I didn't stop.

Then I started getting more emails from Japanese email address which I didn't know. I'm sure they were all threats and demands to cease and desist, but I didn't even bother opening any of them and tossed them all in my spam folder.

I continued to release updates to the bundle over the course of the next year, and within a month or so the email spam and threats had pretty much died out. After the year, interest in the game kind of died out as well, and fewer mods were being made. It did become harder to get the mod files, and sometimes I simply couldn't figure out the password, but I continued to release bundle updates whenever I could. A few months after interest in the game began to taper off, the mod website went down and never came back up.

And then I released one more update to the bundle. :)

TL;DR: Japanese people don't like foreigners mirroring their content, partially because they're xenophobic and/or racist as hell.

That story, Littletoymaker, reminds me of why I don't play that one ship game; while there are instructions on how to circumvent it, the creators have gone to some extreme lengths to prevent the game from being available to anyone outside Japan.

There are a lot of Xenophobes and Racists in Japan. If they want to shoot themselves in the foot by going out of their way to hide their content from the rest of the world, why should the rest of the world give two shits about them?

Where else in the civilized world is this kind of behavior acceptable? If some indie dev, or CEO of a major game studio were to go on a rant about how much they hate one race or another and that nobody of that race is welcome to buy their games, the immediate response would be for nearly EVERYONE to stop buying their games, and publicly shame them until they step down, get fired, or go bankrupt.

In the US, they would probably also be in violation of equal rights laws and get legal repercussions as well.

Rather than clamoring to get a hold of "rare" content that is specifically only rare because it was made by a racist who doesn't want anyone outside of Japan to have it, it seems to me that it would be better to focus our attention on the content creators who are friendly to the rest of the world so that they might become more successful and maybe show the people around them how harmful it is to keep hiding from the world.

@LittleToyMaker - I grinned the entire way through.

@Changer - To be fair, racism is just about everywhere. The only difference between racism in places like the USA and racism in Japan is the transparency of racism in the two places. Racists in the USA are generally more subtle about it, given the fact that the majority of the country is attempting to move away from such things, but in Japan...it's not quite as big of a deal to their society because most of the racism there seems to be (from my perspective) born from a strong sense of nationalism.



Pretty much this.

It is, as Greasyi said, our intent to be a "respectable community of honorable people". The artists that create the content of our fetish deserve respect, at least in regards to the content in question. That is why we have an opt-in blacklist/DNP list to begin with.

However, if the content is hosted elsewhere and is easily available, then there's nothing for us to do about it. We will do our best to respect our artist blacklist, but this ends at the borders of our site. It is not our responsibility - not morally, nor otherwise - to judge or censor what is posted and hosted on other websites. By no means are we obligated to pretend that such content does not exist on these other sites, either, be they legal or not. That is why links to images by blacklisted artists off-site are allowed.

Do note that, all this being said, there is a fine line to tread with the matter. The DNP image being linked to should be posted on a public gallery of some sort, not some imgur gallery or personal image sharing site. Uploading it to and linking to some private gallery simply means that we're still hosting the material due to being the sole determining factor of its existence on this other site. In other words, even if we're not technically hosting the image, it's only in the technicality that we're not hosting it, where as in all intents and purposes we are.

Another thing to note is that, while sharing blacklisted content via links to other sites which hold the content is fine, it is another matter entirely with paid works. With paid works, there is another factor which complicates things - piracy. A link to an off-site gallery of a paid-content game's CG or of a paid-content Artist CG set is fine, because that is put there for the intent of viewing the content and not with the sole intent of duplicating and downloading the content. However, a link to some media site which expressly solely allows downloading of this paid-content media and is not just there for viewing pleasure of the site's visitors (usually as a gallery) is not a link we want on the site.

That's a pretty interesting story, thank you for sharing it

This seems to be a pretty balanced approach. E.g. if we're linking to banned content on e-hentai or gelbooru or whatever, you guys can easily point the artist to the admins over there if they complain over here. Hosting outright pirated material is much more likely to bring legal action (as poor hypnochan learned the hard way).

Funny thing how damaging those small fish can be. It was a group of hypno-video producers that ultimately scrapped hypnochan, right?

If you're referring to Kantai Collection, I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. If you aren't, ignore the rest of my post.

Aside from the website being IP-restricted (which is easily bypassed with a VPN), they aren't doing anything to prevent Westerners from playing it.

You do have to participate in a lottery to be admitted, but everyone has to do that, including Japanese locals. Admittedly, the instructions are in Japanese, but that's already been tackled and they are readily available on the wiki.

You can even play the game without a VPN. You can get your API key to access the flash with your data directly and not have to bother with their website. The game itself doesn't check your IP address and you can play freely without even having to login.

I've been playing KanColle without a VPN for the past year (except for when they update the game and I need to get a new API key).

AFAIR it was audio-file producers that caused the DMCA-shutdown, wasn't it?

Yep. That's the idea.



This is what I was told. It wasn't even video, just audio. Pretty sad, when you think about it.