G'day,

There's something that's been bothering me for a good while now and that is major labels, manufacturers, companies, ect that are currently categorized as "basic" tags and not "copyright" tags.

Oh, and do excuse the Oxford comma. My boss hates them, but I refuse to yield.

The tag that triggered me this time, was "BMW". How is anything expressly BMW not a copyright? Especially if the company logo is present in the image. The logo is in and of itself, an actual internally recognized legal copyright.

I attempted to add the copyright:bmw to a recent post for shits and giggles, and was promptly system denied as expected. Surely, because the basic tag isn't new. Fair enough. Not to mention a wiki already exists for it as a basic tag.

But, how does one fix that (assuming others feel a "fix" is warranted)? Or do I even have such permissions as a "builder" to begin with?

Now, similar things I generally attribute to the implication threads, but this seems a bit different considering there is no implication. An international company's logo is a legal copyright. Period.

Comments, suggestions... Cheers! (Hah, no Oxford comma... You win this round Sir)

Basically, if a copyright has a character associated to it it's a copyright tag, if not it's a general tag.

The use of the term "copyright" for copyright tags is a bit of a misnomer. Ideally they would have been called series tags, but that would have been problematic for individual movies or video games that aren't part of a series (forum #19730). When you see "copyright" on Danbooru, think "fictional universe". McDonald's is a copyright tag because it has its own cast of characters and associated lore. BMW doesn't have any of that, so it's a general tag.

Also, this is just a nitpick, but trademarks and copyrights aren't the same thing. A company's logo isn't protected by copyright law.

The use of “copyright” on Danbooru is a bit of a misnomer because it has nothing to do with legal copyrights. If a logo or whatever eves is copyrighted or not doesn’t matter at all. On Danbooru, “copyright” basically means “something that has characters”. McDonald's is a copyright tag because the character Ronald McDonald belongs to it. BMW is a general tag because it has no characters. That’s just how things are over here, so there’s nothing to “fix”.

This has been discussed multiple times before and I’m sure you’ll be able to find some of those previous discussions.

[Ouch, sniped twice. iridescent slime, please stop reading my mind. o_o]

While I wholeheartedly disagree with the general stance on the topic (I firmly believe all proper credit in every sense should be given whether it be a professional studio, an international corporation, an individual amateur hobbyist, or all combined) I am clearly overridden. I at least now have solid confirmation on Danbooru's stance on the matter and thus can proceed accordingly without trying to break the system.

There is so much Danbooru does right that other sites don't. I'll get over it... Well, grudgingly. But not without Oxford commas.
Thank you all for the quick responses as well.

Cheers!

6th Tag Category Proposition!!

This might need a new topic, and I know it's been brought up a few times in the past in several different forms, but how about we finally add an additional tag category for all proper nouns that aren't copyrights? I think Tsumanne does have a good point, in that BMW and other nouns with capital letters should have a much higher visibility than shoes or bangs. And I could finally and safely move over all named ships from being general tags to the new tag category, whereas right now they're split haphazardly between character and general tags.

For simplicity and the sake of clarity, I'd propose just calling it proper_noun. Thoughts?

@BrokenEagle98 While I'm open to the idea of having an additional category to soak up all these tags and prevent purple tag clutter, bear in mind that "proper noun" paints an extremely wide brush. Just so you know what you're getting yourself into, the category you're proposing would be expected to include locations (Brazil, Yokohama), events (American_Civil_War), structures (Eiffel_Tower, Fushimi_Inari_Taisha), celestial bodies (Saturn), unique objects (FIFA_World_Cup_Trophy), songs (Gangnam_Style), religions (Buddhism), and so much more.

Also, there are quite a lot of tags presently categorized as copyrights that would probably be more correctly suited to the proposed category. These include sports teams (New_York_Yankees) and works of art (The_Persistence_of_Memory). These have never truly fit Danbooru's definition of "copyright" and it's glaringly inconsistent that they still remain purple tags while other organizations and objects have been shoved into the general category.

I'm not saying it would be a bad thing to implement this idea; I just want to make clear that as proposed, it would be far bigger in scope than just brand names and ships. It would leave a lot of open questions and probably create new ones.

iridescent_slime said:

@BrokenEagle98 While I'm open to the idea of having an additional category to soak up all these tags and prevent purple tag clutter, bear in mind that "proper noun" paints an extremely wide brush. Just so you know what you're getting yourself into, the category you're proposing would be expected to include locations (Brazil, Yokohama), events (American_Civil_War), structures (Eiffel_Tower, Fushimi_Inari_Taisha), celestial bodies (Saturn), unique objects (FIFA_World_Cup_Trophy), songs (Gangnam_Style), religions (Buddhism), and so much more.

They won't be that common. Skimming through the first 1000 general tags sorted by post count, I couldn't find a single proper noun. I may have missed a few, but the fact that there weren't any to be found even by accident gives an indicator to their quantitative rarity.

/tags?search%5Bcategory%5D=0&search%5Bhide_empty%5D=yes&search%5Border%5D=count&limit=1000

Also, there are quite a lot of tags presently categorized as copyrights that would probably be more correctly suited to the proposed category. These include sports teams (New_York_Yankees) and works of art (The_Persistence_of_Memory). These have never truly fit Danbooru's definition of "copyright" and it's glaringly inconsistent that they still remain purple tags while other organizations and objects have been shoved into the general category.

I'm not saying it would be a bad thing to implement this idea; I just want to make clear that as proposed, it would be far bigger in scope than just brand names and ships. It would leave a lot of open questions and probably create new ones.

Yeah, no doubt. Still, the meta tag category had a lot of churn when first implemented, and it took a while before we had the precedence of that one mostly down, but all-in-all I'd say it was a vast improvement to the site.

As far as workload goes, well it's not like there isn't already a terrible amount of work that still needs doing, but much if it still manages to get done by our user base. However, unlike much of the constantly accruing workload everything else seems to generate, I believe that once the initial load gets handled and the precedence of inclusion gets sorted out, then any additional load after that should be a small amount and relatively straightforward.

(my opinion at least) Unless I'm missing anything, I think paintings (like the persistence of memory) should always be copyright tags. I've used a few copyright tags for paintings.

A painting is a named work of art. It's like a manga with 1 panel, or an anime with 1 frame.