That's... Sad :/
From their part, I mean

I mean, they're using Amino to begin with. The impersonator is an admin, so that should tell you all you need to know about the quality of the communities they have 😆

Don't they own the IP for the characters depicted? I think you still may be able to DMCA in that instance

The worse thing is that it depends a lot on the country's laws in details like that, as far as I was told. If I am not mistaken, I would be able to claim copyright for my character on where I live, but not of the arts unless the artist explicitly gives up the rights for it.

IF the artist wants. Dude, some artists straight up refused to send me a .PNG instead of a .JPG 😆

Copyright can apply to character designs as well

Chiming in here for a moment (I've been impersoned on FA and Furry Amino too, and I've worked with this topic in the past)

If you commission art from an artist you will never own the copyright (which remains with the artist and rightly should - after all they are the creator of the work) however you will own a license, potentially even an exclusive use one (which you can negotiate beforehand.)

Copyright only ever protects the execution of an idea (e.g the drawing) and not intangible ideas themselves (e.g. the character) Why this is the way it is is clear very quickly if you think about the amount of cookie cutter 'red foxes' in the fandom - obviously if it was possible to copyright the idea of having a simple red fox character you'd essentially fuck over everyone who came after you.

actually protecting a 'character' would be done via trademark which is more involved and less focused on the 'ip' part and more on the 'recognizability' part and which is an entire topic by itself,

At the same time, if someone on the internet uses your username (especially if it's something generic) and a picture of your OC(which is publicly available) as their profile picture, actually constructing a solid case on this that will successfully go to court (not regarding the potential international ramificatons) is almost going to be impossible.

Which all doesn't change the fact that it's a shitty move but Amino is full of dickwads and art thieves so it's also not suprising.

Congratulations, you are popular and hot, Rat kids noticed you! XD

Woooo... >__>

:hugs: Sorry the bad joke. It's not polite. At least things are solved now.

It's things like this that fill me with unnecessary paranoia. I can never get over the fact that some people just... do this? Why?

In which case, this reminds me to post a PSA to my page bio, something like: "Any accounts claiming to be me that are NOT clearly linked/displayed here should be assumed as fake."
It's unfortunate that this is something anyone needs to do, but that's the internet for you.

That's exactly what I will never understand, and what I comfronted them about in Twitter.

It's good to have such PSA's, though people will never be able to register names on all platforms, and many just straight up not care. It's bound to happen to everyone. That's indeed just the internet for you.