'Featured' Nominations, and All About Copyright!

Hey! We surpassed 2000 members! Coolness!


It's nearing the end of the month, so it's time for you members to nominate deviations for the 'featured' folder! For this month, we're looking for nominated pieces from the "Silmarillion" gallery!

Nomination rules!
To nominate for this month's featured deviations (to go into the featured folder and be displayed on the front page), you can either post a comment to this blog or (if you want to be anonymous) send tolkien a note with the links to the deviations you're nominating.
This month, nominate deviations *only* from the Silmarillion folder. Other folders in the following months!
You can nominate up to ten deviations You don't have to do ten, but you can!
Don't nominate a deviation that's being featured this month (you can see this month's featured here: tolkien.deviantart.com/gallery…) As there are no features from this month, it's open season!
You can nominate *one* of your own deviations, but you MUST nominate at least four others (if not more) if you do.

Nominations end at midnight GMT on April 30th.


Copyright. Ah, copyright, such a sticky word that artists as original creators love but that fan artists tend to cringe to. Why? Because, with the exceptions of parody and satire, you are breaking copyright with every fan creation you draw, paint, or write in several countries around the world. You are certainly breaking UK (Tolkien) and US (New Line/Warner Bros) copyright laws with every awesome Luthien and wonderful Elijah Wood as Frodo. Crazy, huh?

So why is fan art and fan fiction thriving despite this? As this excellent article explains, our works are not seen as harmful, so long as we do not profit from the work. On top of that, it's not the best business practice to sue your fans. I highly recommend reading the article, it's very informative.

DeviantArt.com has their own rules to copyrighted material. Fan art is obviously allowed, or several hundreds of millions of pieces would not be here, and this community certainly would not exist. However, posting/manipulating screenshots in any of your deviations from Peter Jackson's films is not allowed. Finding an image off of Google and using it in your photo manipulation, with the exception of stock art, is not allowed. When you use stock art or Photoshop brushes you did not create, you should credit your source. You can find out more about violations here, and more about "what is 'fan art?' here. tolkien moderators do their best to follow dA copyright policies.

We've been getting a lot of submissions lately that do not follow dA's copyright policies. With the exception of dA stamps (which are "for fun" and not "deviations"), copyrighted material such as screenshots or copyrighted photographs you found from Google should not be used.

Thanks.