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Thank you for coming to visit the Free Art Foundation, an effort to gather art and artists from around the world who share the view that Art is universal reflection and that You cannot prevent the transfer of knowledge simply because someone else thought of it first. At the Free Art Foundation, you are welcome to post your music, graphical art, stories, program code, and other forms of intellectual insight, so long as you make no restriction on its redistribution. You are free to take copies of art to do whatever harmless activity you desire, so long as you don't establish any additional restrictions on the use of the art you've copied. This is the short version of the Copyleft philosophy, and it's the core principal upon which we're founded.
May 24th, 2010 — The founder will be running for City Council for the Third Ward of Winchester, Virginia, USA. The campaign website can be found at vj2010.com
. Some campaign artwork may come from / go to this site as well. (-:May 6th, 2010 — A few changes to permissions will finally open things up. Most importantly, users can now create, view, and edit pages, file galleries, and image galleries. Also, each user now gets a group by the same name, so when new user "Joe" registers, a new group named "Joe" will be created. This way, if you want to make a private page, such as for rehearsal purposes, you just remove permissions from everyone but your group.
March 26th, 2010 — We failed to recover the old database. It may yet be possible, and there are surely some SQL gurus out there who could glean the information out of it, but as it rests right now, it's simply cost prohibitive to try and recover it. Live and learn. Now, regular database backups are being made to a second server. Most artists keep backups of their data anyway, so as long as we didn't permanently alienate anyone, we should be able to rebuild what we had pretty well. In addition, we're using the (very) new TikiWiki 5 Alpha. In sandbox testing, this Alpha release turned out to be more complete and stable than either the LTS release or the 4.2 release. Plus, the 5.0 release will add some features that we really want, so it just makes more sense to switch to the new system now and just apply the necessary patches to make it work.
- Don't break the law! I don't want my site being shut down because someone thought that posting a copy of a new hit movie on this site was a form of free art. I leave it up to you to figure out what's legal for your jurisdiction, but primarily you need to keep things legal for my jurisdiction if you don't want my site to experience legal problems. My jurisdiction is the City of Winchester, within the State of Virginia, within the United States.
- Speech is Free Speech isn't free because we make it free. Speech is impossible to restrict. By joining, you agree to this.
- Porn is OK! Well, sort of. I have decided that it makes little sense to try and block "adult art" from a free art site, for a number of reasons. First of all, for all of you graphic artists, have you noticed just how many nudes are in art lesson books? Second, to try to separate adult art from other art is rather arbitrary. It's a gateway restriction that leads to separating "hateful" art from "tolerant" art, "political" art from "social" art, and "commercial" art from "private" art, which are all distinctions that I do NOT want to make. Go back to the first rule; don't post ILLEGAL porn!
- Mark the Porn! This is part of rule number one, and it's a matter of common courtesy and decency. Use warning pages that let people know that they may be offended by what they see, hear, download, or read. Make it clear. Don't hide warnings.
- Be Ready to Have your Feelings Hurt Please, be nice. But also, remember that there are people who can't control themselves, and they're going to be mean. They might take your "Snuggles the Snuggly Huggy Bear" story and turn it into "Snuggles Goes on a Jihad" story. They may do that.
- Don't Defraud Lying about having produced something is a type of fraud. If you upload a cartoon called The Sbimpsons, with the balding power plant worker called "Bomer Spimpson", and you say you produced it entirely yourself, then chances are that you've committed a form of fraud. However, if you take The Mana World and write a book series chronicling your own character's journeys, then that is most likely completely legitimate. Lying to take credit for yourself or to defame someone else is fraudulent, and that may have serious legal consequences.
Want to upload your art? First, you need to create a new account. The account creation tool should be working, but if you have any trouble with it, please email benjamin at winchesterpc.com so that you can be added. This site is built upon TikiWiki, which is a powerful, highly extensive content management system. Please feel free to explore what features currently exist, but keep in mind that this is an alpha release, and it may still have some rough edges. When in doubt, email the admin.
Want to download art that has been uploaded to the site? Browse the Art Categories!
Want to start your own user page or browse other User Pages? This is an open area where you can make a wiki-link to your own free page. Make a page, a gallery, lists, contact info, or whatever.
Want to create or get involved in Projects?? This is like the User Pages, except that this is meant more for collaborative projects, like films, games, and so forth.
- Now that the Wiki is much more robust, it would be nice to start bringing in more traffic. It might be nice to have a few more like-minded people creating pages and helping to refine the structure. Of course, I don't want to advertise that the service is back up, because I don't want the server to be slashdotted and make a lot of users disappointed and lose interest.
- We need a logo! I have a few ideas in mind, ranging from a large, monospace "FREE ART FOUNDATION" header to a dapper looking anthropomorphic mammal wearing a jacket. If anyone wants to throw some ideas my way, or even donate a character that has already been created, it will make me smile and giggle.