That’s Farked Up!

April 26th, 2007

Fark has a new copyright policy: All your photoshops are belong to us.

From TFA:

It’s a big deal, one of FARK’s more popular features is its recurring Photoshop challenge, where users post remixed images to FARK’s forums. FARK already earns ad dollars from the traffic these challenges generate, but according to the new policy, it now also owns the copyright to anything a user posts there in perpetuity. Although it does state that users can re-publish their own works. Which is nice. Sort of. But not really.

How kind of them to ALLOW you to republish your own handiwork. Will Farker’s revolt? Probably not.

UPDATE:(From BoingBoing) Fark’s Drew Curtis has gone on record saying that this agreement isn’t good and will be fixed soonest — great news!

We�re not, we�re asking for a non-exclusive right to republish. Submitters still own their submissions, we�re asking for reprint rights in case we can use it. We have no intention of acquiring ownership of submission.

ANOTHER UPDATE: (from Boing Boing again) Fark’s Drew Curtis adds:

“Something else no one knows, because no one asked, is that since the inception of the website, I have been contacted on multiple occasions by mainstream media people (or otherwise, such as when Thomas Dolby asked permission to blow up submissions to a PS contest with him as the subject to poster size for his own house) about using Fark PS submissions. I have refused to give the permission, and instead have on every occasion contacted the individual who owned the work and told them that the didn’t need to respond to the media inquiry but if they wanted to they could. Because of this, if you ever saw a Fark PS in Mainstream Media that was uncreditted, it was used without permission.”