 a hoi hoi and welcome to the channel. I'm Dr. Sumerian, not a real doctor, and today we are going to talk about images on the SCP Wiki with a special focus on SCP-173. Let's get started. So when I very first joined the Wiki Mac in 2012, the attitude towards image use wasn't exactly, let's say, careful. Basically it was the Wild West. If you wanted to steal an image off the internet and use it to create an article, plagiarism was fine as long as you didn't steal text. And even then, the current enforcement of plagiarism, even for textual plagiarism was inconsistent. It's not like anybody's going back into the old stuff and being like, you know, is this too derivative of this over here? People do reference stuff all the time now and get pinged for plagiarism when that kind of stuff happened in the past quite a lot and no one really bothered or cared about it. Evolving attitudes on the SCP Wiki towards intellectual property sort of finally came to a head in 2014. So in 2014, what happened was that Zumi Kato, the creator of the image, or I should say the creator of the sculpture behind the image that was used to create SCP-173, contacted I believe the creators of SCP Containment Breach because SCP Containment Breach became quite popular around that time. And then that person also contacted the SCP Wiki and eventually made a connection between the two. And what came of it was that and this was almost like right around the time I was I mean not almost this was right around the time I joined back up the side. I joined in 2012, read a few things and then forgot about it for a couple of years and then and then got reminded of it because well the first time I showed up was because of TV Tropes and the second time I showed up was because of TV Tropes. I just saw it on a thing and was like oh yeah, let's see how they're doing. And then I went and then I joined the community and then I you know started writing things. My first written SCP was in August of 2014 and the initial correspondence between Izumi Kato and the SCP Wiki was in August of 2014. So it was right around this time I was becoming active on the Wiki. And at that time in 2014 and specifically in August of 2014 the attitudes had not changed much. This is important to realize when you steal an image you know plagiarize an image to and claim it as your own as though you've created it without any sort of credit whatsoever. This was something that was not only accepted but sort of almost encouraged by early Wiki users and creators because it was just a matter of not I don't think it was a matter of not I think it was a matter of not understanding not just intellectual property in general but like the importance of of crediting the people who create the stuff that you use. However I will say that the 173 debacle and the problems behind you know when I should say when Izumi Kato told the SCP Wiki that he was allowing them to use his art but only in a non-commercial manner. Now the SCP Wiki's Creative Commons license is not a non-commercial non-commercial license and there are just a few currently probably may even just be down to one at this point but there are a few exceptions to the to the site-wide license that basically these exceptions are rare and no longer really done anything you put up on the wiki now has to be compatible with the create the site's Creative Commons license and we can talk about and a lot of that was the threat like the idea that what if Izumi Kato had not Izumi Kato was not happy that the SCP Wiki was using his sculpture in the way that it was the sculpture has a very specific meaning in his art and recontextualizing it and taking it and turning it into something else is not only disrespectful to the artist but it's disrespectful to the art and this is true in modern times too and and you will be maybe you won't be surprised but you could be surprised at how often people will say something stupid like he should just be honored that his art is being seen by so many people because you know of course exposure is the best payment so many people get to see your art aren't you happy that people get to see your art not everyone approaches art the same way not everyone is is uh fulfilled by the same things when it comes to art um and you should respect that but regardless around that time is when the SCP wiki's attitudes towards art theft and played art plagiarism really started to shift and it took a while now I became staff in I want to say 2016 it might have been it might have been earlier than that but it definitely wasn't later than that it was definitely around that time and I joined as part of the licensing uh team specifically and I sort of made it a pet project of mine to not just what's the word I'm looking for here not just change attitudes towards image enforcement and image uh theft on the wiki but to actually like set down protocols and rules and get us started on a path where we could actually make the wiki fully creative commons and compliant and actually credit every uh every person in every article in every image that is ever used on the wiki this is a monumental undertaking and it was something that I looked at a long time uh as like earliest this is the thing my earliest attempts at making this work were going up against a very entrenched opinion that there was no real need to do it now the scp wiki uh is almost certainly protected I say almost because you never know what these things is almost certainly protected under uh safe harbor provisions uh wiki dot certainly is almost certainly is uh but the scp wiki exists in sort of a weird middle ground in which it could be argued that they do curate their content and it's a bit more complicated than that when you curate when you actually remove content for reasons if you actively remove content because it falls below a particular quality level or you're doing it for any reasons like that uh your safe harbor provisions start to become looser and looser at that point uh it's complicated however when I was working on making image compliance a thing because it was not a thing before that really it was really really difficult to convince people that it was an important issue and not only that but even today like the the only argument you can make to people that gets them to understand the importance of it isn't sadly the intellectual theft issue or the plagiarism issue because many people almost certainly even people who are on staff right now don't really see it as an intellectual theft or plagiarism what they see it is is a legal liability thankfully that alone is enough to convince enough people that it's an issue that needed to be dealt with and before I left staff it was uh I set into place a number of uh policy proposals that were passed and we set up sort of an infrastructure for the basis of an infrastructure I should say because there are many people who came after me as well uh who worked on this as well a little bit less familiar with their work but I know that it was it was it's it's definitely a different landscape today than it used to be um but I set up the basics of the infrastructure that they use today for image removal and more importantly not and and this is something to be something to just think about when you're doing uh SCP let's say SCP derived content like say SCP containment breach or SCP secret laboratory you have to make a choice if you ever ever want to monetize your works you can't include an image of SCP 173 or or more accurately you can't include an image of SCP 173 that doesn't fall under a fair use uh definition and fair use is really really touch and go you can't just say fair use you have to it's complicated and really the only person who will ever tell you for sure if your use was fair use or not is a judge which means you've got to pay for lawyers and it's all up to whether or not the other side is willing to pay for lawyers too and at that point it becomes a thing essentially whenever you say something is fair use you're basically saying I am willing to hire a lawyer and prove in court that this is fair use not I can use this and you can't do nothing about it but the SCP wiki today under a variety of people though I believe is it Elegy fish truck is the name of the user who handles a lot of image compliance issues now is really really good to the point where it's like I don't really have any critiques for it it's really really good about ensuring image compliance it used to be the wild west and then I remember I instituted policies where at the very least new articles had to source all images or those images would be removed and we also set up a sort of a process for fixing old articles as well uh this was three series ago so this was before that I mean so the last three series have been under the policy of you have to source your images in order to post them period um and then of course we had all of the articles that came before that that had to be run through and every one of them that had an image had to be dealt with one way or the other either you find a source for it or the images removed those are the only two options and for the longest time and this is true even when I first worked on the policy back in uh 2017 18 it's it's time time is around time is loopy it's it's fine but um when I first started working on an image policy it was pretty much like understood that despite the fact that there was a legal like this legal uh sword of Damocles hanging over our heads the entire time screw it let's just take the risk and keep up the classics like 682 or 049 or uh or 173 let's just keep them up who cares um and the thing about that I think that really changed people's opinions was simply time I mean people have noticed you know for three series for example that aren't even before that because some of these have been changed even like a series or even two series ago the classics I should say but go back in time and people have no idea what this is going to look like or how much of an onerous it's so much work one way I gotta source my works but then you go you know three series with no problems and suddenly it becomes a matter of well it's not much work and if I have to do it why why isn't the why haven't we fixed these previous problems and so articles with old old uh non-creative commons compliant images have been replaced over time with uh I mean 682 is probably the most salient example and I guarantee you that one day one day I don't guarantee it but I'd put good money on the idea that at least sometime in the future scp 173's image will either be removed entirely or altered to be something else to make the entire site 100 compliant with our creative commons license uh that day's coming and what inspired this was of course uh secret laboratory changed the design of their as well used finally changed the design of their scp 173 they'd been thinking about it and talking about it and working on it for a while like years at least a year um and finally did it so I thought I'd do a little video about the evolution of image enforcement on the scp wiki just so you can have a better understanding if you ever were to write for it or even if you're reading it and seeing an image that you don't recall from the last time you read an article uh what has happened and why it's happening anyway that's it thank you very much for watching if you enjoyed the video hit the subscribe button and then hit the notification bell next to that so you're notified when I upload new videos and then head on over to patreon.com forward slash d samarian and pledge at any level like everybody here on the screen already has it's nice to know that i'm not alone out here and I will see you all again on tuesday