I couldn't find any official guidelines on this, apologies if it's posted somewhere.

Since characters can't have actual DNP status given to them, I figured that it's a good idea to have the wiki page for the character's tag mention that their owner doesn't want the character posted.
This seems easy to do when art featuring a character has been uploaded in the past and a tag already exists. If someone tries to upload art featuring that character, they would be able to use the tag using auto-complete. Afterwards anyone can visit the tag's wiki and find that art of that character shouldn't be uploaded.

But what should be done when there is no existing tag for a character? In that case the uploader will use the tag for the first time and its name may not match with the name of the wiki page, which makes it sort of pointless.

I'm probably overthinking this, but I'd like to know if this is a good practice and what would be the best way of doing it.

Characters to avoid is the wiki page that documents characters whose owners have frequently requested art featuring their characters removed.

booruhitomi said:
Characters to avoid is the wiki page that documents characters whose owners have frequently requested art featuring their characters removed.

That's useful, but I don't think it really solves the problem. To me it sort of feels like that page is not very accessible, would be nice to have it linked in uploading guidelines or next to the characters section on upload page. As it is, having the character's wiki page mention this sort of information seems like a better idea since it would be easier to find.

Also this wouldn't help in my case since I couldn't find a history of takedowns made by the character's owner. All I have is their request not to have their characters posted on the website. Should they still be added to the list?

There should be an enforced list for this, because its really a pain in the ass.

Official Information:
Characters, character owners, and commissioner do not get a DNP status and must request additional takedowns for any new uploads (excluding reposts of previously deleted artworks) submitted to e621.

Any particular reason for this?

Also, ordering the list by character name rather than their owner's name is meh, especially when not every character has a name (or at least one that's easy to track down), or when a character owner has multiple characters and all are taken down.

strikerman said:
Any particular reason for this?

I'm guessing its so an artist and a commissioner have a falling out, the artist still has the final say on whether or not a picture should stay up.

strikerman said:
Any particular reason for this?

Characters change hands all the time, so frequently in fact that unlike an artist who's work won't magically be considered made by a different person (alias don't count) Characters can't be gurenteed to still be in the hands of the person who claims ownership of it. Making a list of DNP unreliable

versperus said:
Characters change hands all the time, so frequently in fact that unlike an artist who's work won't magically be considered made by a different person (alias don't count) Characters can't be gurenteed to still be in the hands of the person who claims ownership of it. Making a list of DNP unreliable

I guess? But there's no way they change so often that it'd completely invalidate the list, plus worst case scenario the new owner can pop in to clear things up. That's got to be better than letting users post things without any warning and forcing the character owner to submit another takedown request.

strikerman said:
Also, ordering the list by character name rather than their owner's name is meh, especially when not every character has a name (or at least one that's easy to track down), or when a character owner has multiple characters and all are taken down.

At the same time, not all characters of a particular owner may be "DNP". Perhaps they don't want a young character on a "porn site", or a deeply personal character they don't want mistagged, but are fine with older less-important characters here. Plus, if I know a character name well enough to tag it, it's helpful to be ordered that way. Given that art of characters are often commissioned, it may not be immediately clear who it belongs to, or it could be a joint ownership, or the owner could change hands. So going by the character name then having details of the character with it (current owner(s), previous owner(s), whether it's often drawn by a particular artist, etc) would be more helpful, I think.

strikerman said:
Any particular reason for this?

Ownership of a character has a much higher legal standard compared to artwork. E.g. I can't just take a normal dragon, name him Frank, then have total control over Frank_the_Dragon. There has to be enough specific about the character that differentiates them from other characters, and there's no fine line between an unprotectable character and protectable character. But even if you have a protectable character, a depiction of a character that's reminiscent of them is not necessarily "infringing", as it were. It becomes a fight between the character owner and the artist that made a supposedly unauthorized picture of them. If the artist concedes, they can file a takedown on the artwork and e6 will take it down, if not, e6's obligation depends entirely on whether the character owner or artist is in the right. (AFAIK, IANAL)

watsit said:
Ownership of a character has a much higher legal standard compared to artwork. E.g. I can't just take a normal Charizard, name him Frank, then have total control over Frank_the_Charizard. There has to be enough specific about the character that differentiates them from other characters, and there's no fine line between an unprotectable character and protectable character. But even if you have a protectable character, a depiction of a character that's reminiscent of them is not necessarily "infringing", as it were. It becomes a fight between the character owner and the artist that made a supposedly unauthorized picture of them. If the artist concedes, they can file a takedown on the artwork and e6 will take it down, if not, e6's obligation depends entirely on whether the character owner or artist is in the right. (AFAIK, IANAL)

Not sure that example works, since Cammy the Sylveon got stuff with their character taken down.

strikerman said:
Not sure that example works, since Cammy the Sylveon got stuff with their character taken down.

I didn't say it's impossible for a character to be owned/protected, just that it's not as automatic as artwork. I also don't know what NMNY did to verify that takedown, as it is otherwise true that characters don't get DNP. In any case, I was a bit off; a character owner can request takedowns of their character, as long as it wasn't uploaded by the artist, in which case the artist would have to request the takedown. I would presume there's still some verification that a post is intended to depict the character in question, though.

strikerman said:
Any particular reason for this?

1. Character owners and commissioners do not own copyright to the artwork. Artists do, unless they specifically make contracts to move the copyrights, which is usually really expensive and mostly used in corporate enviroments.
2. There are so many OCs which are e.g. eevee, but with a spot somewhere in their body or spiky hair, which would easily roll down the road of banning all eevees from the site, because they look like OC. Enforcement would also be straight up nightmare.

Also two things you guys are forgetting:
1. We already say that you should have permission to post content here, if you have permission then you do not have anything to fear.
2. If we scrapped the takedown and DNP system and went with bear minimal US law requirements of DMCA, only artists would be allowed to takedown anything and they would always have to file new DMCA whenever their content is posted here as we would only need to takedown content that we have been made aware of violating copyrights of someone.

We are already doing a lot more than we would need to be doing, mostly so that we wouldn't be biting the hands that are feeding us. Posting something freely online doesn't mean that everyone has the right to copy and send it forward, but that is still the best baseline to go by with site like this where majority of content is posted by the third party users. If you do not want artwork of your OC to travel trough the internet and on random peoples hard drives, don't post it freely online. Same with anything you put online, always assume that it will stay online and there's not much you can do about it. I literally got a message from someone asking about who made a video they have on their device and it was taken down from here two years ago.