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Question about Copyright
9 years ago
General
COMMISSION STATUS: OPEN
Journal starts HereNow, I'm fairly sure I'm right with this.
Say I draw something as a gift, for free, for someone. Say that person decides they want to sell that piece of art work for whatever reason.
This person never purchased the rights to my work, nor did I ever express that they have the right to redistribute or sell my artwork. In fact, the specific reason created the image was due to an agreement that they wouldn't sell the character or artwork, which they agreed to.
I don't know why I'm having trouble thinking up the specifics of copyright, but I'm fairly sure you can't sell someone elses work even if you bought it as a commission without discussing/purchasing the rights to do so.
I'm not going to link to this particular piece of art. I have a habit of saying too much and getting a suspension for it.
I'm also not going to advocate any actions, either. Despite the fact that the artist has both deleted my comments and blocked my two accounts.
I've asked them twice to remove the image and not sell it, I've also sent a ticket to the admins. I'm more or less just lookin' for advice.
EDIT:
Since this is all said and done, I'll lock this journal for now. It'll stay until I get that apology or until it's no longer useful.
Thanks for all the input.
Say I draw something as a gift, for free, for someone. Say that person decides they want to sell that piece of art work for whatever reason.
This person never purchased the rights to my work, nor did I ever express that they have the right to redistribute or sell my artwork. In fact, the specific reason created the image was due to an agreement that they wouldn't sell the character or artwork, which they agreed to.
I don't know why I'm having trouble thinking up the specifics of copyright, but I'm fairly sure you can't sell someone elses work even if you bought it as a commission without discussing/purchasing the rights to do so.
I'm not going to link to this particular piece of art. I have a habit of saying too much and getting a suspension for it.
I'm also not going to advocate any actions, either. Despite the fact that the artist has both deleted my comments and blocked my two accounts.
I've asked them twice to remove the image and not sell it, I've also sent a ticket to the admins. I'm more or less just lookin' for advice.
EDIT:
Since this is all said and done, I'll lock this journal for now. It'll stay until I get that apology or until it's no longer useful.
Thanks for all the input.
Comment posting has been disabled by the journal owner.
This oughtta help.
Short answer is this, though: What that person is doing is illegal. What you can do about it, though, is pretty limited unless you want to do some sort of lawsuit. Hopefully the admins will take care of this.
Even if they had paid you money for a commission, they still don't have the rights to resell your art unless that was part of a contract you made with them at the time.
I don't have time to sit here writing a paragraph trying to explain copyright to you. A decent link was already provided, or just look it up your damned self and stop being an uninformed whiner.
And yes, I probably would recommend going to court for it. Chiefly because Bandai-Namco doesn't have a horse in the race and has nothing to do with it, so that argument is out the window from the start. If anything, if a renamon is the subject in question, then the person trying to resell the art would be the one violating Bandai-Namco's claims, if they were going to make the assumption that they'd be involved at all.
I draw a lot of other people's characters. They own their characters. They still aren't allowed to resell MY artwork of their characters. That isn't how this works. Get it straight.
Bandai Namco doesn't own the character. The species, the digimon, yes, but the character wasn't created by Bandai Namco. It was made by your princess and designed by me.
I own the artwork, my artwork is being sold with the character. The difference here being that I found out my artwork's being sold and I ain't havin' it.
I offered alternatives but both of your are much, much more convinced that winning this uphill battle is much easier than just, y'know, considering any of the options I presented? Buy the rights to that piece of art so you never have to hear from me again? Delete the image and draw one yourself? Give me a slice of that payment?
You're figuratively just stabbing yourself in the chest over and over and claiming you're winning this argument. A shred of thought, a single consideration into this instead of dropping into damage control in the fear of a lawsuit is astounding.
The artwork is being sold.
Yes, the character is a renamon, but that's not my problem? My problem is that my artwork is being sold indirectly or otherwise without my permission or consent? Regardless if it was a gift or paid for, the rights to the artwork are mine, meaning that the artwork cannot be sold without my consent or without the rights to which being purchased. The gift was to portray their character, not to have a product to be sold. IF someone's going to get paid for my artwork, it's going to be me.
Instead of trying to white knight with passive aggressive assertions that are irrelevant to the core issue, how about you just draw the character yourself and use that image to sell with the character instead of my art?
How is this hard to understand?
In digital art, you are essentially just getting a copy. You license that picture with EULA terms in some sort of way. There can be an infinite number of copies, so you would have to sell the actual license to it to transfer the ownership. Only the owner of the license can sell that license. Selling a copy would be wrong. It really depends on the license model you use. But yeah, digital rights management is really weird.
If the character is being sold in a bundle with the artwork then... THE ARTWORK IS PART OF THE DEAL AND IS BEING SOLD
That's how bundles work. Look at -any- company that says 'free with purchase'. They're not giving it for free, you're -buying- something to get it, so, it's being SOLD. Companies do it to make it -look- like a good deal. It's a marketing tactic.
However, yes, Solid, you retain rights to the work. And since the work is, indeed being sold in a bundle, this is illegal.
As for taking the person to court, which...this other individual is basically saying 'it won't happen' you legally could, actually. It'd be small claims court, sure, but court is court.
At the end of the day, however, the problem is that these individuals have chosen to cherry pick words from arguments and focus on them, ignoring the artist's rights and starting arguments on semantics.
Since you gave the person the gift with his/her character on it, is his/hers now, but all the credit of who did it goes for you. If the person wants to sell the chaarcer in the pic you made, is ok because is his/her character, thou the new owner can ask for permission for posting the work you made or not,but the new owner NEEDS to give you the credit for the pic.
Its a delicate theme to be honest, but as I said: it can be applied to RLstuff. For instance a game, you give your friend X game and he plays it and stuff, but eventally he gets bored of it and decides to sell it (probably half prize of the original)to a friend or someone. He can do it cause thou, you bought it, belongs to him once he got it and used it, and he can do whatver he wishes to the game to be honest.
However, the problem here is that, in regards to the game example, I still own the game. They asked to play the game, so I let them play the game. Then they up and want to sell it, but I never gave the ownership of the game to them, nor did I get consulted about this choice. The game was given to be played, not sold, as the art was given to depict a character, not tern a profit.
The thing about digital artwork is, in this case, the character is owned by him, but not the art. He can sell the character, but not my art. The art is being pushed in with the character. The idea being to use the character AND image to gain profit.
Further more, gift or otherwise, permission needs to be given or discussion had if a sale involving the image is to take place. There was no intention of this and my statements/comments about it were denied, deleted and I was blocked, further showing the intention to sell my work without my involvement.
I appreciate the comment and point of view. It is a delicate matter, hence why situations about selling artwork, characters and intellectual property shouldn't be taken lightly.
In this case, because the image is digital, there's really nothing for the gift-recipient to sell. Essentially anything the 'buyer' could do with a piece of digital art first involves creating a new copy of it, and without Solid's assent that is impermissible.
(Obligatorily, I'm not a lawyer and I'm not giving legal advice.)