WildCritters

WildCritters
Author(s)	Owner: Spike Founders (WC): AJ, Pawsie
Website	http://wildcritters.ws/
Status	Online
Launch date	2008?
Genre	2ch style art community
Rating(s)

WildCritters' old logo

Pawsie and WildCritters "free art" rules

WildCritters is a furry image board, art archive and communities in the style of e621, Furpiled.com, and other Danbooru-based boards. It specializes in cute chibi, cub, and/or feral furry art, typically of an erotic nature. Much of the art tends to be Japanese style furry art (Kemono).

History

Originally created in 2008 by Furvy and Chu at the URL wildcritters.us, the website went through an unusual change in ownership on July 21, 2009. It went from the hands of Dunkinbean and Furvy to Spike, which caused it to go through some fundamental changes.

On August 1, 2010, the site went down due a security breach. On August 17, the site moved to wildcritters.ws after the owner of wildcritters.us stopped redirecting traffic to the server.

In December 2010, WildCritters opened up its original "critter" definition to include such things as humans with furry-styled highlights (e.g., tails or ears), referred to as halves. This, along with a more permissive policy on the granting of privileged accounts and concerns over the preservation of low-scoring images, led to the creation of a competing website at wildcritters.net, later known as VeeBooru.

Controversy

WildCritter's administrator, Spike, has consistently taken the position that artists who distribute their work for no charge should have no control over the further distribution of their work.

• October 26, 2011, Spike (as Pawsie) denied a request by artist Justvisitinggg to have his artwork removed from the site, with the justification that:

"If you give something away for free, you don't get to take it back". This is how I view distributing media over the internet.

The artist responded by removing all of his artwork under that alias from the galleries posted. Pawsie argued that the artist decision was "childish, selfish, blatantly being mean, and playing the victim".

• May 3, 2014, Japanese kemono artist Sanae requested his artwork to be removed from WildCritters after some of his media was posted without his permission. A follow-up post seemed to be indicate that his request was granted.

On May 9, 2014, Sanae posted that Pawsie had just changed the changed the visibility option on the images (still on site, but invisible). When requested by Sanae to remove the images, Pawsie again invoked that free art was "Fair Use", with the only option to "sue him and win" to have an artist force him to remove their art.

In the journal comments, Spike maintains the opinion that his website falls under fair use, and that the audience should be able to ignore the creator's rights in order to have access to their creations if they choose to distribute them without charge.