Hello everyone. We have a bit of unfortunate news.
A few days ago, SCP Wiki Staff began a discussion to remove Untitled 2004 from SCP-173's article. If this discussion goes positively, and the follow-up vote is in favor of removal, SCP-173's image will be removed on February 13th, 2022, for reasons which be explained below.
The SCP Foundation is currently licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 (abbreviated CC-BY-SA 3.0). What this means is that SCP as a whole allows anyone to share or make derivative media of it, including art, movies, games, readings, etc. under the following conditions:
- You must give appropriate credit to the creators.
- You must release your derivative media under the same license.
This has become an important part of the SCP Wiki and community since we migrated to Wikidot over a decade ago. However, as authors (and staff) didn't know much about licensing originally (nor did SCP have the significance at the time for it to be as big of a deal), they would often grab images from the Internet at random, including images that their creators would not allow the use of.
While the Licensing Team has been doing a fairly good job of replacing old images and ensuring new ones are completely legal, one image hasn't been replaced yet due to its cultural significance: Untitled 2004, SCP-173's image.
Untitled 2004 is unique in several ways. Besides being iconic, it is also the oldest SCP image on the site, originating with SCP itself on 4chan in 2007. However, it is also the only image on the site that is not CC-BY-SA 3.0 compliant, by virtue of it being copyrighted by Izumi Kato. It is because of this that, eventually, Untitled 2004 would need to be removed from the article.
Izumi Kato has extremely graciously allowed us to use Untitled 2004 on our site, on the condition that Untitled 2004's itself or its likeness would not be used for commercial purposes. Nonetheless, we cannot indefinitely keep the image on SCP-173's page, especially since it has become increasingly difficult for us to prevent Untitled 2004's likeness from being used for commercial purposes by others as SCP grows.
Licensing aside, Untitled 2004's usage on the Wiki is also an ethical issue. Izumi Kato did not intend nor ask for his art to be used as an SCP, and the meaning and purpose of Untitled 2004 has been, in some ways, permanently tainted by its use in the article. Kato kindly and retroactively allowed its use for SCP-173 in 2014 on condition, but it was clear he was not happy with the situation. Additionally, his art's been exploited by third parties trying to profit off of SCP, which has likely caused him much distress.
As such, we believe the most correct course of action in this situation is to remove Untitled 2004 from SCP-173. Although this process has been delayed significantly, the longer we wait, the more harm is done to Izumi Kato's creative vision and the risk of legal issues becomes greater.
To be clear: Izumi Kato has not forced us to take down the image; we are removing Untitled 2004 proactively out of legal and moral obligation. Please do not attempt to contact or harass Kato over this; he has tried to remain uninvolved in SCP to a reasonable extent and we are incredibly, incredibly thankful for his general cooperation.
While normally SCP Staff would attempt to create replacement images, SCP-173 will likely not be receiving one. This is because the original author of SCP-173 — Moto42 — has requested via email that we do not replace SCP-173's image when we remove it. This is to allow everyone to envision SCP-173 for themselves, instead of there being a singular, definitive, official "SCP-173". Although the status of adding a replacement will be voted upon as well, it is likely that SCP-173 will remain without an image. To be clear, beyond the licensing notice and the image, SCP-173 will not be modified in any way.
Nonetheless, The Community Outreach Team will be launching an art event (not contest) to create a massive art collaboration page full of various interpretations of SCP-173's appearance, to give tribute to the original image and fulfill Moto42's wishes. If you're interested, you can join in here.
We thank the SCP Community for being as wonderful and creative as it is, and apologize for the necessary removal of the iconic image. As we move forward, we hope that this event will help bring the site closer together, and inspire more art in the future.
If you have any further questions or concerns, you can leave a comment below, and we'll do our best to answer.
(account deleted)
