Legal Questions

[Greenbats]

I hope this isn't against forum rules, if so please delete my thread. Anyways if some nobody draws a pic of comic character and gives credit to the original creator can they sell that pic on ebay or would that be against copy right issues? For example say someone drew a pic of Batman but in the corner of the drawing wrote, Batman created by Bob Kane, would that be against copy right laws?

[atlasjj]

Yes it would be against copy right laws. Even if you credited the original creator. For you to sell a drawing of Batman (Or any copyrighted character, place, ect) you would have to get permission from the person/company who holds the current copy right and if they gave you permission then you could sell the drawing without breaking any copyright laws. But if you do sell said drawing on ebay without permission then DC could go after you for copyright infringement.

[Paploo the Ewok]

http://adistantsoil.com/2010/11/06/c...ueries-part-i/

Randomly encountered this and unlurking to give you some better advice- Colleen Doran has a good blog post I've linked to above about the issues surrounding selling fanart.

"DC Comics doesn’t care. Really, they don’t. As long as you are not making sketches of Batman and Robin having sex, for the most part, DC will ignore you. For the same reason I don’t care if you draw a pic of Rieken and sell it at a convention. I’m not a copyright absolutist, and the great thing about copyright is you don’t have to enforce copyright law in order to maintain your copyright.
..................
However, if you decide to make a major commercial operation of your use of my characters, and start selling paintings which are your copies of my cover art (which has happened,) I’d be upset. And I’d send you a letter asking you to scale it back."

So basically, don't overstep your boundaries, don't plagirize [aka don't be Rob Granito], don't mass produce [ie- sell the originals, or a very small run of prints], and no one's going to freak out or have issues, and if you're at a show with editors or pros they might even buy one from you. Lots of pros and amateurs sell commissions all the time, and comic companies are very much so aware of it, and approve of it. They only tend to come down on copyright issues if it's something that negatively affects them [like say, uploading their comic online and distributing thousands of copies of it w/o their permission]. I love fanart personally- the occasions people have done fanart for my webcomics or the con mascots I designed have all been quite awesome :)

I'd suggest reading Colleen's entire post- she has some very good points, and goes into stuff like officially sanctioned fanart as well [she's done this for Lucasfilm, and for LOTR]

[Greenbats]

thanks for the replies this was very informative. especially the Colleen Doran article. I don't plan on selling any fan art as I can't draw with a darn, but one of my friends is very excellent at drawing stuff, and I've always wondered if she could sell her custom drawings or not. Thanks again for the help. If she'll let me I'll load some of her artwork up on here and you guys can tell me what you think of it.

[Paploo the Ewok]

thanks for the replies this was very informative. especially the Colleen Doran article. I don't plan on selling any fan art as I can't draw with a darn, but one of my friends is very excellent at drawing stuff, and I've always wondered if she could sell her custom drawings or not. Thanks again for the help. If she'll let me I'll load some of her artwork up on here and you guys can tell me what you think of it.

One other thing too- often when doing commissions, you don't just get fanart requests, you also get stuff like portraits/figure drawings of the person requesting it or of their friends, or sometimes you'll get requests to do fanart of their original characters [I did a snazzy commission for one nice girl at an artist alley, who also got a lovely piece of her characters drawn by Faith Hicks- there's lots of people who collect art of their own original characters, kind of a fun thing to do]