New bulletin added! First part is more a person opinion but I think the second part people will mostly agree on
Hello everyone! Hope you all have a wonderful day! What is this thread? I’ve noticed a couple problems in the freebie community that I wanna talk about. I’ll make bulletins about each subject and post a link here! Feel free to bump this thread and leave comments with suggestions for a next subject! Can’t wait to hear your opinions!
Here are the subjects (so far)!
The problem with adopting freebies to get rid of them immediatly (+freebie resellers)
The problem with non-freebies in the freebies tags/forums
Do you have any subject you think should be talked about? Pls let me know!
Won’t ping you but that’s completely understandable! Though pls don’t be afraid to own a lot of characters if you like a lot of characters then No one should judge you for that. Aslong as you like them I personally don’t see an issue ^^
Now bulletin added! It’s about people promoting sales through the freebie tags! (I think a lot of people understand why this is frustrating)
something I tend to notice with anything free, (and even I have to remind myself not to do) is that one person will claim for a bunch of threads, leaving it difficult to have any choice to gift (say I've already gifted them something before and want to pass on a character to another person) and it kind of holds up the gifting threads for a while.
hikaru-i (sorry for the ping) yeah I see that happen a lot (I’m probably considered one of the people that does that aswell ^^; but I make sure I only adopt a character when I really like it or if they fit in my story) I notice some people just adopting characters and then… not even naming them…? Or just leaving them in their hoard of characters never drawing them, writing about them etc. Honestly it always makes me sad when a character I give away to what I believe is a better home, the character I just never used or not very loved and it makes me sad because I know that maybe somebody else would have actually liked them more but never got the chance to adopt them.
Added a new bulletin (about free OBO, it’s more of a person opinion so feel free to give your own opinions ^^)
Honestly, I wonder if the only way we can fix this is by making a new tag to host freebies under. The problem with that though is sellers would probably catch on and flood both tags. It's really upsetting to see people advertising like this.
Also, I do wanna say, you aren't cheap for wanting freebies. Some people (like me) literally don't have money to spend on characters. Plus there's something really cool about getting the opportunity to repurpose a character that didn't (or couldn't) get much attention anymore.
Even giving away characters feels amazing. Yeah, it's nice to get something from it, but I almost prefer giving away things over trading. With all those sales flooding the freebies tag, it's hard for both people giving away the characters and people looking for them.
I dont' usually go through the freebie tag because of this problem, but I am super thankful to the previous owner of Ty Tanium. He was a legit freebie, and it just made me happy that there are still people using the tag correctly.
I don't think there's a real point I wanna get across, I just wanna talk about it, and give my opinion.
EDIT: I forgot about OBOs/FOBOs. I personally think they're fine if you're willing to give them away, but as soon as there's an offer (an actual offer, not just a claim for free) you should take it off the freebie tag, as it's no longer free. If you don't want to give it away at all, just move to the trade tag, please.
Something I've been seeing a lot of recently are people trying to trade and sell AI generated characters from cites like "thisfursonadoesnotexist" and "Artbreeder." It really upsets me when people do this because characters and artwork created by AI are not protected by copyright and they're part of the public domain. This means everyone has the right to use the image or character in any way the desire. People who trade and sell characters like this are basically trying to make profit off of an already free thing. You can't claim them as your own!
The one time I feel it is okay to trade characters like that for profit is when a new design is created based off of the original character. If you spend time creating something new based off of the character in question, then you've put some effort into basically making a new character that wouldn't be considered part of the public domain. But of course, people selling and trading them don't want to put in that kind of effort! Why else would they have stolen a free character in the first place?
This is something I feel could be addressed since it seems to be getting more popular and people keep doing it-
I think some of those "build your own character" cites could also be addressed in something like this since they're basically the same thing.
Here are a couple of links I found regarding the whole AI generated image thing:
https://dot.la/creative-machines-ai-art-2656764050/particle-1
https://lighthouse.mq.edu.au/article/december-2019/AI-generated-art-who-owns-the-copyright