User Skoll666 made a sound edit of publicly available animation and uploaded it here with a permission from the original artist. The post gained over 1k upvotes and then it got deleted with the reason:

Paysite/commercial content. (Patreon)

Original animation: post #1976388

Deleted sound edit: post #2738541

Of course the delete reason is not valid. Here's a description from Skoll666's submission on FA for confirmation

Another sound edit I have made a while ago of an animation by the amazing oughtansfws.
Huge thanks to Oughta to let me release this edit to the public.

Please see the external links below for the full version.

Sound edit by skoll666

Original Post

--snip--

Like it? You can support Oughta here: Patreon

From this thread:

Q: I want to contest the deletion.A: Write the person who deleted the submission a dmail and you can ask them to reconsider the deletion if you believe it has been deleted in error.

Please note that insulting or harassing staff about deletions can and will end with disciplinary actions against your account.
If you ask them respectfully they are also more inclined to give you a respectful answer.

In this case, Dmail Mairo and politely make your case for undeletion.

Writing description yourself is like writing on paper that you have permission to break the law. That's not exactly permission and I have been way too naive in past to believe in these kind of things. Alternatively you could've maybe gotten permission to do sound edit, but not to use patreon only quality of the file itself.
As paid content is currently againts the guidelines, it is also enforced, unless there's some actual direct evidence othervice (artist themselves posting the file, here or their own pages for example). These usually require written permission from copyright holder themselves (artist) to our head admin NotMeNotYou or trough contact email preferabely before uploading.

Also ebea57, you are technically also breaking the rules here by linking to a MEGA download of the content which has been deleted for being paid material, linking to such things is also againts the rules similarly to posting it.

Yea it is really nearly impossible to take someone's word that an edit was authorized. Generally you'd need to have the creator themselves put forth verifiable proof of said permission. This is mostly to protect the integrity of the site from DMCA claims and the like. It's best to err on the side of caution.

mairo said:
Writing description yourself is like writing on paper that you have permission to break the law. That's not exactly permission and I have been way too naive in past to believe in these kind of things. Alternatively you could've maybe gotten permission to do sound edit, but not to use patreon only quality of the file itself.
As paid content is currently againts the guidelines, it is also enforced, unless there's some actual direct evidence othervice (artist themselves posting the file, here or their own pages for example). These usually require written permission from copyright holder themselves (artist) to our head admin NotMeNotYou or trough contact email preferabely before uploading.

Also ebea57, you are technically also breaking the rules here by linking to a MEGA download of the content which has been deleted for being paid material, linking to such things is also againts the rules similarly to posting it.

Oh boi, I didn’t expect that the upload is causing so much trouble. The mistake was clearly on my side, since I wasn’t aware about the process. Lesson learned!

And I also agree that it’s hard to tell if someone is honest, since you can claim everything without evidence. So I totally understand the removal. I am also in contact with the admins regarding the proof for the permission and a possible reactivation of the post.

Nevertheless, I also have a sound edit of the shorter 720p version, which was made from the publicly released file. If it is in general more acceptable for you, I would rather release this version here and let the other one removed regardless of the permission. I also don’t want to cause some kind of precedent. In that case I would remove the connection to my accounts, but I would prefer to get an approval from a janitor or admin beforehand this time.

skoll666 said:
Nevertheless, I also have a sound edit of the shorter 720p version, which was made from the publicly released file. If it is in general more acceptable for you, I would rather release this version here and let the other one removed regardless of the permission. I also don’t want to cause some kind of precedent. In that case I would remove the connection to my accounts, but I would prefer to get an approval from a janitor or admin beforehand this time.

Well, in this instance there would also be the question that because the version was of higher quality, do we delete the original post over the edit, because the edit is not touching the official visuals in any manner?
Also if you post 720p version and there's 1080p version available, we generally prefer hosting as high quality version possible within limits of rules and guidelines, so technically speaking 1080p version would still be preferred at that point.

Sites rules and guidelines generally aren't really well written around sound edits, because everything is based around visuals and audio only posts are also normally deleted as irrelevant content, so sound edits are kinda in gray area in general because technically they are audio only uploads of content we already have. It was similar situation with flash uploads were text only uploads were approved if it was flash, but images were deleted as irrelevant.

mairo said:
Well, in this instance there would also be the question that because the version was of higher quality, do we delete the original post over the edit, because the edit is not touching the official visuals in any manner?

The edit is almost the same as the original video. I only made a small cut of about one second, since there was a looping error in the transition from the close up to the full picture at around 1:53 min that resulted in a slight change of the rhythm. Without sound effects this shift is almost unnoticeable. So I would rather keep the original post without sound.

But this cut would also apply to the 1080p version, which is in general a bit longer (approx. 3 min) compared to the 2:20 min runtime of the 720p version. I guess the runtime of the 720p version was reduced to fit the Twitter requirements.

Oh, that the focus of e621 is primarily on visuals explains a lot for me regarding the actions of the janitors or admins, thanks! It would be great if you could specify the guideline for sound edits a bit more. From my personal point of view I always prefer, if also the original with the original sources is still available, since you never know if something got lost by editing or due to compression. That’s why I always link the uncompressed Mp4 files to my edits.

For your evaluations, you maybe could also include, if the overall artwork is enhanced in case the visual quality is the same. For audio edits of videos I would keep the original as parent and only allow a few edits in the same or better quality, like with different versions of the same picture. Just a suggestion, but I don’t how strict you are in that regard.

Regarding the further procedure, I would wait for a reply from your admin first. I wouldn't have any problem with both options.

skoll666 said:
But this cut would also apply to the 1080p version, which is in general a bit longer (approx. 3 min) compared to the 2:20 min runtime of the 720p version. I guess the runtime of the 720p version was reduced to fit the Twitter requirements.

Twitter is currently the primary reason for general degradation of many artists works, because for some reason everyone only post on twitter, meaning that content is 2:30 minutes max (used to be 30 seconds), 720p max and then on top of that, heavy compression is applied to the uploads. There are many animators who exclusively post GIFs to Twitter. This is an actual current issue which is pretty devastating, almost moreso from flash and its downsides.

Twitter is not a place to post and host content, it's to quickly share something funny which will be forgotten in a day as it buries under the timeline, yet more and more artists use that as their primary or only platform.

Just wanted to point this out, because Twitter might currently be the biggest factor as to why currently released content ends up in such abysmal quality and state and almost no artist seems to want to improve on this or care about their works archival in far future and we continue to have the same issue like with animations from literal 90's.