Neopets TV Show?????

[Liou]

I seriously doubt they'd take the time to browse through old NT issues and petpages. It'll be lucky if they get site canon right, and even if they don't, I expect this to be a rather fresh take for entirely new viewers and for some who're only passingly familiar with the site. The goal is probably to stay hip and relevant, not to crumble into ... Oldness.
Keeping my expectations nice and low anyway.~

[mac]

The agreement exists so they can legally share user submitted work on their website, and by extension the Neopets Magazine when it was running, only as something clearly marked as user submitted. TNT went out of their way not to use fan ideas for characters or plots. Current-day Neopets owner JS has no qualms with stealing however and has been caught doing it numerous times, so I wouldn't blame anyone for being concerned about it. That said, it looks like JS will not have a creative role in the production of this cartoon, only Beach House. The likelihood of them stealing from fans seems small, but still a possibility. There is no telling where they are drawing their "inspiration" from.

I would be furious. Fan works are a legal gray area, but regardless of the legality of it, theft is still theft. Artists and writers are taken advantage of constantly because of it. Never let anyone trick you into thinking they are entitled to your work. Speak up if it happens to you. You may never be compensated, but people should be made aware of it. Especially for something like a cartoon show.

[Moni]

i like the ongoing hypothetical question because it theoretically assumes i'm good enough for somebody to steal from me

[mac]

Feb 12, 2020 20:14:09 GMT -5 Moni said:

i like the ongoing hypothetical question because it theoretically assumes i'm good enough for somebody to steal from me

I thought the same thing until it started happening to me. No matter how critical you are of your own work, there is always the possibility of someone seeing value in it and taking it for themselves.

[Huntress]

The ongoing hypothetical question is a fascinating topic in its own right because licensing law is easily one of the most complex fields of law out there (and makes me twitchy every time I run into it in my work because every nuance matters) but when you take a look at the Neopets ToS, the thing is fire- and bulletproof. Like, it even waives moral rights in territory of the EEC, which Europe considers unwaiveable (well, under specific circumstances that may or may not apply). In short, if you submit your stuff to Neopets in any shape or form, it's entirely theirs, not yours, morally and all.

(here's also where we get to an important distinction between Anglo-American and Germanic (aka most-of-Europe) law, which very simply boiled down is that under AA law, you can conclude transactions that are harmful to you, under Germanic law you can't. Or to boil it down even more simply, by signing up with Neopets, we absolutely could and did consent to thievery of all our submitted created works xP)

The flipside of it is, of course, that no way are they going to touch it with a ten-foot pole if it's going to cause a stink regardless of legality. Being in the right pursuant to law doesn't help you a whole lot if your reputation as a company is on the line, and they're a small and wobbly enough company to have to consider that aspect. Plus it'd be outright dumb of them to trawl through literal hundreds of NT submissions in hopes of finding something they can shape into something suitable for the TV screen, when it's a lot easier to just write an episode from scratch and avoid all potential stinky wobblies in the process.

The point of my post mostly being that if you're a creator on the internet, it pays to be familiar with what's behind the Terms and Conditions clickboxes we all like to slide past so readily. The law can work in your favor or against you, but it's easier to run in your favor when you know what it entails.

[mac]

The agreement was never intended to be used to take fan works and use them, but it was written in such a way that it would legally cover their butts while they were hosting them. It is the same cookie-cutter submission agreement used on social media platforms. And they can't not word them that way, people are always looking for ways to catch companies with their pants down and serve them bogus lawsuits if they don't. Neopets itself was a victim of this in 2015-2016.

I wouldn't put it past JS to abuse it for their own selfish gains, but they don't even need it to justify their actions... The stuff they've stolen was mostly taken offsite from people who never agreed to anything. And most famously they used art assets from RPG Maker in their own non-RPG Maker product (AAA's Revenge), which has nothing to do with Neopets... But none of that even matters, because according to the law, fanworks are considered copyright infringing anyway and do not fall under fair use (unless the intellectual property holders themselves deem it so). And thankfully, most appreciate fan content because it is free advertising and respect the artists... but not always.

But regardless, you are right - when you agree to submitting things online, you lose control of your work to varying degrees. That is the nightmare we are living in as creators. But that doesn't mean shrugging your shoulders when it happens. When people have been vocal about theft, it has had happy endings. Disney has stolen from fan artists countless times. Bad eggs in the production line steal designs for merchandise, enamel pins, and even for paintings located in their parks... essentially getting paid for someone else's artwork. Those who were wronged were apologized to and fairly compensated thanks to the internet collectively making Disney aware of it. We even had our own instance of it, back when JS stole from Suta-Raito, and tried to pass it off as a "coincidence" that the lines were exactly the same... No apology, but they removed the content after much backlash from the community...

Anyway. This feels like it's way off-topic now, but I don't want anyone here to be content with the idea of their stuff getting jacked, the legality of it be darned.

[Herdy]

Yeah, as someone who has had their work stolen by the current TNT (Legends and Letters launched with content directly cut and pasted from my work on the Book of Ages), it certainly isn't above them to take from others.
That said, JS do so with the absolute minimum effort. Every time they have stolen content from others in the past it has been the result of using the first results that come up in search engines for whatever they are looking for. They certainly are not going to go to the trouble of manually looking through past NT entries for stories they want to take.

[Fraze]

Briefly sliding through first impressions: Enghhh, high levels of doubt. I'll leave my doomcroaking at the door, but suffice it to say that if the show is a flop I can see that having a negative impact on the site itself.

However, I did a bit more digging on Look Mom! Productions, and things just keep getting more... interesting. First of all, they definitely go for the Adult Swim. The demo reel showed a lot of "ugly" style animation (as Breakingchains mentioned) and a whole lotta gratuitous blood/gore/violence. Which makes it a really odd choice of studio for a Neopets cartoon.

On the other hand (and I'm surprising myself here by having anything optimistic to say), Look Mom seems more than willing to take risks with its storytelling. One of my biggest concerns has been that we'll get a completely soulless, uninspired cartoon with cookie-cutter plots and flat characters. I'll forgive a lot (as in pretty much everything) in terms of visual style and animation quality, so long as the show has decent depth to it.

Then I found something really interesting.

I tried looking up some of their shows on TVTropes (because honestly it's informative than Wikipedia), and not surprisingly most of them didn't show up. But there was a page for one of their longest shows, Gary and His Demons. Which TVTropes has listed as being produced by Mondo Media, aka the guys who did Happy Tree Friends.

Mondo Media and Look Mom are both owned by Blue Ant, and they seem to work in partnership a lot. (I wondered if it was Mondo making the cartoon entirely; but they're based in San Francisco, not Canada.) Buuuuut considering Mondo does webtoons, there's a pretty good chance that our fine Neopets series will be an internet-only thing and won't make it onto TV at all.

If that happens, it will probably only be released on Mondo's and/or Look Mom's Youtube channels. Which people will only go to if they're looking for... the kind of stuff those studios usually make. The entire cartoon might just flop for lack of reaching the right audience.