Hello everyone!
Here are informations on various topics that we felt we should share!
Banned members
We make all our possible to avoid banning members. But let's face it: some people are jerks, and when we have jerks causing troubles and refusing to calm down, the only viable solution is to ban them. While we always do our possible to explain them, you may have noticed that many members are banned right after registration, sometimes in a matter of minutes. Obviously, we don't try to reason with them, sometimes don't even wait for them to post. Those however aren't real users, they are
spambots. We have ways to spot them even before they post, thus the speedy bans.
Deleting accounts
Requests to delete an account will not be granted.
Copyrights
Copyrights are a tough topic. We would really want to just let you share whatever you want, but there are two problems to consider. First, obviously, when you share Astro Boy episodes, you don't pay for them. Tezuka Production needs the money, so it wouldn't be fair to cheat them of their hard-earned cash. Second, and this is why we are starting to be much more strict, is because copyright laws are becoming extremely strict themselves. You may have heard of the
SOPA. This is an USA set of laws designed to criple copyright infrigements. Basically, when a website is found to infringe on copyrights, it is shut down at
DNS level, which means that it becomes impossible to find it world wide. You understood correctly: this law will be applied world wide despite being from USA only, because the USA control the DNS system. So even if a server is located in Australia, it can be cut off the Internet by this law. At any moment, someone finding illicit material can request the website to be shut down. This may happen without a proper trial, even without notification. So we may simply discover one day that
http://www.astroboy-online.com has ceased to exist, without even knowing what link caused that.
For this reason, we came up with these guidelines:
[FONT="Comic Sans MS"]We need YOUR help to keep ABO "Legit" by not posting certain kinds of links![/FONT]
Many of us have enjoyed episodes, trailers, movies, AMVs, etc. that feature content directly out of actual anime by Tezuka and others. What you might not realize is that much of this is, unfortunately, in violation of copyright laws.
So even though we dearly love Astro and the rest of Tezuka's 'Star System' we need to learn what is and is NOT acceptable to post on Astroboy Online. If we remain "relaxed" about content that is copyrighted, we could face serious penalties - or be shut down altogether!
- "Nooooooooo!!"
As you can see, Astro is NOT happy about this!
Here's what we can NOT do anymore:
- Don't post links to download or watch any anime episode, television show, movie, manga, or music video (even if it's on something like YouTube)
- Don't post an invitation to members to contact you for information on how to access these kinds of links
- Don't post a link to another site where visitors can readily find these kinds of links.
- At this point, don't post links to anime, movies, manga, etc. at a foreign-language location (such as Japanese or Korean).
Now for the Good News - Here's what we can continue to openly share:- Our own fan fiction, artwork, AMVs, videos, etc. (just not using a significant amount of content from Tezuka's original work - any doubts, just contact a moderator). Songs are allowed in AMVs.
- Links to an excerpt (about 10% or less) of a show, a movie, an episode, etc. This falls under "fair use".
- The contests can continue - we might have to eliminate links to music videos, but that doesn't mean you can't enter the name of the song and artist.
- Links to legal streaming sites such as Crunchyroll or Hulu
How you can help- This is a HUGE undertaking, and we are asking every ABO member to be a good steward of our forum by helping each other understand what we need to keep off of the site, and if you spot something that should maybe not be posted, just contact a moderator and we'll check it out.
- The best thing we can do is let Tezuka Productions know how we feel about the lack of readily available anime/manga outside of Asia. If they give us access to more material, we all win!
- Please understand this isn't a fun thing to implement, and is going to be a great deal of work, but we've got a lot of bright, creative and fun-loving people here on ABO, and we're confident you'll all work with us to protect our special corner of cyberspace!
Any questions - simply contact one of your friendly moderators!
- I wanna be a mod!!
- Yeah, that'll work; you and Spider!
The rules page will be updated soon to reflet these guidelines. This is not that different to what we had been doing in the past months, but hopefully it will prevent confusion!