As you may already know, I have decided to abandon my presence on Weasyl.

It is a shame, because they had a format and features I really liked. However, their administration has gone overboard in their policy enforcement. This is especially true for vocal musicians.

Two weeks ago I received the following message:

It has come to the attention of the staff that your gallery contains numerous submissions which violate the following Community Guidelines:

Section I.A.3, which states:

"You may incorporate the work of others into new works; however, the use of borrowed content must either abide by fair use or you must obtain permission from the copyright holder. The submission will be removed if it meets neither of these requirements. If it does meet these requirements, you must still cite the content’s source in the submission description."

Section II.F.2, which states:

"Must not sample clips longer than 30 seconds. The full length of the clip is considered, rather than the length of time it is looped for."

We ask the following from you:

Please provide proper citation or permissions granted for use of images for which you do not own.

Remove audio submissions which exceed 30 seconds and use copyrighted content you did not make yourself (example, the “Try Everything” song which uses copyrighted Disney music for the background singing).

I, of course, responded incredulously. A vocal musician either has to create their own backing track or sing a capella in order to comply? Seriously? And only after having the items up there for over two years do they now come and ask me to remove them?

Inquiring further, they said it was because of copyright concerns. Well, to be perfectly honest, even doing your own backing track or singing a capella is still a violation of the copyright of the songwriter. So, why allow covers at all?

In addition, why even make a backing track available if they aren't going to permit you to sing to it? Oh, sure, if I were to distribute it and charge people money to listen, yeah, that would get the attention of both the backing track company and the song writer. But in my experience, which goes back ten years, they don't bother with small potatoes, even if they do make a few bucks, which I never have, except in the form of an occasional donation. And while most backing track websites say something like the following:

"This website respects all music copyrights. All rights are reserved for the protected works reproduced on this website. Without permission, all uses other than home and private use are forbidden."

This obviously brings up the question, "What constitutes private?" Singing karaoke at a birthday party usually qualifies. Singing karaoke at a convention usually does not. But you don't find the RIAA coming after cons for hosting a karaoke night. A restaurant that features it once a week, sometimes. But not usually. But furthermore, even if it is used in a money making venture, it is the creator of the backing track, not the distributor (most backing track website share their tracks with each other. It's easier than reinventing the wheel) who complains, since they are the ones holding the copyright on the recording.

And this brings up the main point: It is the duty of the copyright holder to defend their copyright. It is NOT the duty of a website to do this preemptively. In other words, a website that hosts artwork, music, etc. does not have the duty to go searching through submissions to find items that violate copyright. This is primarily because it is a waste of time and energy that can be devoted to more important things. Every website I know of can, and will, respond to a complaint that a particular item is in violation of a copyright. They will usually NOT go searching for violators themselves.

And there is a very good reason for this. Not only is it not their duty to do so, they can make mistakes in judgement and take down submissions that are not copyright violations.

Which is exactly what happened to me. Since most of my submissions contained backing tracks, it simply was not worth my time and effort to remove them myself, ESPECIALLY when in doing so, I would disrupt my primary work, The Beach Bears Story, leaving it with huge gaps. It would be like going to the movies and sitting through fifteen minutes of disjointed scenes, and coming out wondering, "What the hell was that?"

So, I decided to simply let them take them down for me.

Which they did...but not all of them. In fact, most of the ones they took down were where the ICON was in violation of their guidelines.

The ICON!! I have searched the internet and found absolutely NO lawsuits involving icons except between big names like Apple and Microsoft. I frankly doubt that anyone would give a rats ass if someone decided to use their copyrighted item as a freaking icon for a piece of music, since it is the music, and not the icon being featured. Oh, if when asked they claimed they made it themselves, that's a different story. But to be expected to cite the source of icons when nobody gives a crap?

In addition, they took down submissions where the icon was clearly of things in the public domain: famous paintings, landmarks, even icons I created myself!

They took down every single one of my Christmas Carols, many of which not only contained icons clearly in the public domain, but the music itself was in the public domain! Much of it sung a capella!

This is why a website does NOT go preemptively protecting the copyright of someone else until such time as the copyright holder complains. Because they end up going too far and pissing people off needlessly.

Weasyl has gone too far. I refuse to put up with this crap, and have removed all submissions.