Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 201 posts

Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#81

Post by scrollaway »

lmm wrote: post #72
scrollaway wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? dA is full of artists selling their art and users buying it. It's full of Patreons, donation buttons, etc. See Twitch for what successful monetization of this sort of audience looks like.

A lot of that commerce happens in violation of copyright, and sometimes in violation of other laws too; it can fly under the radar when it's person-to-person but would be harder for the company to monetize. Is Twitch profitable? Have they had to face a serious copyright infringement lawsuit from a game maker yet?

That doesn't sound right. dA is the original source for a lot of the work being sold. I'm not familiar enough with the community to know if they're being used as a black market but I know for certain that lots of artists use it as a sales gallery.

Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#83

Post by lmm »

scrollaway wrote: post #81
lmm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of that commerce happens in violation of copyright, and sometimes in violation of other laws too; it can fly under the radar when it's person-to-person but would be harder for the company to monetize. Is Twitch profitable? Have they had to face a serious copyright infringement lawsuit from a game maker yet?

That doesn't sound right. dA is the original source for a lot of the work being sold. I'm not familiar enough with the community to know if they're being used as a black market but I know for certain that lots of artists use it as a sales gallery.

> That doesn't sound right. dA is the original source for a lot of the work being sold.

Right, but a lot of what's sold there is "fanart" that uses copyrighted characters etc.

Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#84

Post by mcbits »

yestoallthat wrote: post #76
mcbits wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first I heard of Wix was a few months ago when a local news site deployed their new design. The page would be completely blank for 10-15 seconds while it made hundreds of requests for useless little React turdlets. As far as I can tell, they "fixed" it by moving away from Wix. If that's normal for a Wix site, then I would say no, nobody involved on either side of the transaction is a web developer except in the m…

I thought you were exaggerating, but holy cow... maybe those who disagree can find me a site from http://www.wix.com/explore/websites for which that doesn't hold true, because I gave up after a few which were all incredibly abysmal. Yeah, those sites are "stunning" alright. Aesthetically very bland and samey, but technically utterly stunning. I wouldn't even know how to make something that slow without using a combin…

To be fair, I just tried a few of those sites and they're not as slow as the one I had in mind. But I wasn't exaggerating about that particular site. Each page view was taking at least 10 seconds to show the first pixel of content for what is effectively a static blog.

Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#85

Post by kevin_b_er »

kijin wrote: post #15
blackhole wrote: post #10

One potentially alarming sentence in this article is "Wix will open up DeviantArt’s repository of art and creative community to the Wix platform, giving Wix’s users access to that work to use in their own site building." Exactly what do they mean by that? Will it be opt-in? Will it only cover art that's already under Creative Commons? Will be it all Creative Commons? Does a Wix site count as commercial use? I can't i…

You cannot unilaterally change the license on someone else's work. A lot of images on DeviantArt are under very restrictive licenses. I'm assuming they will present an option for artists to allow their work to be used on Wix sites in exchange for royalties, with the middleman taking a percentage of said royalties.

Read around in the comments. The DeviantArt EULA gives them a blanket license. The artist may also provide a very restricted license to the public.

The license is already granted, to DeviantArt.

Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#86

Post by delinka »

buro9 wrote: post #70
blackhole wrote: post #10

One potentially alarming sentence in this article is "Wix will open up DeviantArt’s repository of art and creative community to the Wix platform, giving Wix’s users access to that work to use in their own site building." Exactly what do they mean by that? Will it be opt-in? Will it only cover art that's already under Creative Commons? Will be it all Creative Commons? Does a Wix site count as commercial use? I can't i…

https://about.deviantart.com/policy/submission/ 3. License To Use Artist Materials. As and when Artist Materials are uploaded to the DeviantArt Site(s), Artist grants to DeviantArt a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to do the following things during the Term: a) to prepare and encode Artist Materials or any part of them for digital or analog transmission, manipulation and exhibition in any format and by…

Notice it says nothing of re-licensing to others. These terms seem to facilitate DeviantArt's (and presumably its owner(s)) ability to show your work to the world on their site. But does not facilitate their sub-licensing your work to others. If I were an artist and loved my DeviantArt account, I'd make sure to hold them to task if my work showed up on a Wix customer's site.

Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#87

Post by delinka »

Kesty wrote: post #78
TheArcane wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Royalty-free? Looks like a bad deal.

It's a classic point in most, if not all, social websites or where the content is generated by the user. And it's usually there to protect the website for altering storing and advertising with user generated content. It always has had the potential to be used for bad, we will see if this time actually happens.

"Royalty-free" doesn't mean they can just do what they want. It means they're not going to pay you for the things listed in the license (to which you agreed by hosting on their site.) It doesn't even say "...perpetual license." It's clearly limited to stuff you've put on their systems, while it's on their systems. You remove it, they can't use it.

Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#88

Post by yestoallthat »

mcbits wrote: post #84
yestoallthat wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought you were exaggerating, but holy cow... maybe those who disagree can find me a site from http://www.wix.com/explore/websites for which that doesn't hold true, because I gave up after a few which were all incredibly abysmal. Yeah, those sites are "stunning" alright. Aesthetically very bland and samey, but technically utterly stunning. I wouldn't even know how to make something that slow without using a combin…

To be fair, I just tried a few of those sites and they're not as slow as the one I had in mind. But I wasn't exaggerating about that particular site. Each page view was taking at least 10 seconds to show the first pixel of content for what is effectively a static blog.

Sounds like all 3 I clicked on.. they all loaded 150+ tiny files, and started out with several seconds of a white screen.

Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#89

Post by neom »

roryisok wrote: post #74
neom wrote: post #8

From 2001-2007 I worked on helping build the community at dA. Had such an interesting and unique childhood and teenage years due to deviantART (and IRC). I owe everyone from that time a huge thank you for helping me become who I am today. It lost all it's magic (for me) when Scott and Eric Kolb left. Angelo is an absolutely amazing guy and I really really admire him but it was pretty sad to watch the community die. F…

> Chris Bolt the dude who built a lot of the tech there is INCREDIBLY Incredibly what? =) I haven't touched my DA account in years, but more because I've stopped drawing than any issue with the site or community. I was exposed to the work of a lot of amazingly talented people through DA, that I probably would not otherwise have seen. http://rorypyro.deviantart.com/

Sorry, bad at this English thing. He's *INCREDIBLE!!
Post reply on HN