The truth behind inkstone
You are free to do alot of things with your content, but they also have full rights, if your story blows up n gets super popular, enough to make lots of money n get published in hard copy, they have all the rights. They even have the right to censor or modify at their leisure if they want to translate it into Chinese since it falls under:
CKtalon ''modify (which is made solely for the purpose of formatting for display''
Formatting can mean alot of thing, and am not talking about changing fonts, or spacing......
Pay us according to SS or something like that
Before you talk about having your art stolen, how many Webnovel authors actually finish their damn stories? I've only read TWO finished webnovels and am reading one consistent author's work.
KoraL Jury? Stuff like this probably only exists for some cases inside the USA. In other countries (and international lawsuits) it not practiced having civilists make a vote.
Alone getting a case open with your lawyer and work towards a lawsuit against Qidian would costs several thousands of euro/dollar, while this isn't even guaranteed to go towards a court.
For most people it would simply "not worth it" to try getting a single cent out of Qidian.
Simply by delaying long enough so no normal person has enough money to give a jugde the chance to judge would mean losing the whole initial investment and possible future chances.
I'm sure if the class action is initiated by an American and the authors participating in the lawsuit are only American, then it can be done in a US court.
The more likely case would be a class action settlement before the case is taken to trial. If the case is big enough, some lawyers would be happy to take a cut of the settlement and consider it probono in the case of a loss.
KoraL Jurisdiction.... So what if some random american judge says something? Why would Qidian care? Really, that judge would overstep his jurisdiction. Even if some judgewould sentence Qidian to millions upon millions... Why would they pay? It's impossible to enforce.
american law =/= international law
American court =/= international court
Knilthas Wrong they do not have full rights. They have a limited license grant. Only the author retains full rights.
Could they translate the story, sure that technically falls under formatting. But you the author can also choose to
- Stop writing on this platform
- Pull your story from the platform and toss a DMCA.
I really wish people would quit it with the tinfoil hat theories of big bad Qidian. Qidian isnt going to waste time and resources to translate a story from En to CN for thousands of reasons.
The most glaring ones being CN is highly patriotic. They have thousands of authors, you think some Western Author is going to do better than them? This is a company, here to make money. Again people, Qidian is not going to waste resources on a book that will at most have the popularity of their mid tier authors. If they need a mid tier book written in CN they can pull one out of a box filled to the brim.
Gamblejay Don't DMCA's require them having to have done a violation first? Also although a scenario as most people are describing is unlikely it is still in theory possible. If someone does intend to actually try making a novel they would probably want some feeling of insurance so they can't be blamed for having questions.
AzuleX If the rights holder doesn't want their content hosted on the site and wishes to retract any rights it originally gave but the site refuses to remove it, the rights holder can issue an DMCA for it to be taken down. It is why the original 'perpetual' clause was removed.
It's simply fear mongering by other parties who do not wish to see Webnovel grow.
They are also trying to misrepresent what modifying means when it is clearly stated and elaborated that it's just for the formatting for display, not translation or anything.
CKtalon It is fear because people seem (to me) not to have the answers to their questions. It might be useful (if it's not actually done) to put the answers about "rights" of a novel published on QI in the FAQ book or somewhere on the InkStone platform.
If Gamblejay didn't explain step by step the statement, I would also have asked myself the same questions (even if I don't really care about my rights on my story :stuck_out_tongue: ).
akuma06 It's legal jargon so it's understandable that it's difficult to understand it.
The general idea is Webnovel will respect your copyright since it is yours. If they really like it, they will try to sign a contract with you to acquire your copyright by paying you or offering you other benefits.
That's how it works in China. They have been in business for 16 years now. If they had shitted on copyright so easily, it would have long caused Chinese authors to shrink away from them and they would have long closed down. The few Chinese authors (out of about 6+ million) that complain are naturally the ones who want to earn more once they became famous. They forgot that they got to where they were because of the China Literature's strong platform and huge readerbase.
Other parties with their own interests are naturally vilifying China Literature when it comes to rights because they feel threatened. They pretty much don't have any case though.
CKtalon Of course, I understand that! Never have I thought that QI would be shameless and take original stories for granted because someone published it on their website.
However, if some people make those assumptions, it's simply because they have been mislead when reading the ToS. If the Book of Answers or a FAQ in InkStone had explicitly stated how QI manages the novel rights, less people would have misunderstood QI.
Anyway, it was just an idea that came to me when reading this topic, you can do whatever you want with it :).
CKtalon Does gamblejay also work for qi. If so 
, you know he’s gonna try to change and distort truths. Here are the questions that you Ck should answer directly.
When an author finishes: can qidian publish it without giving any profit to the author?
Will qidian be able to also give the rights of their “worldwide limited” license to any group who works for with or under them?
After you answer these; you should stop posting, pretend you were never here and tell gamblejay to stop trying to define for the moment what everything is since qidian itself did NOT OFFICIALLY DEFINE IT.
Again what I did was repost. What game did was try to define what’s vague, but that does nothing as he can’t speak for qidian as the clause can be interpreted thousands of ways. #AMBIGUITIES
What did you expect? You get to display it on international, high-traffic web novel site for free to gain a foothold in the community
If you're talented you'll gain a name, fanbase and acknowledgement from writer peers, if not at least you lost nothing since its basically anonymous.
Just contact them when your first novel has been a success, they'll probably pay for the next one. If not, someone else will.