&quot;Artists Beware&quot;

So..where's the link to the ripped off picture?

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I am only asking for advice at this point, the issue had already been resolved

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Gotcha. Should have mentioned that, haha.

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I'm sorry but I have only asked for advice ^^;
I didn't feel details on what happened were too important for getting advice

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Oh, ok! sorry about that!

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I don't think this was meant to be a tracing post, just an advice post.

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Sorry, didn't see you'd been answered already!

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ljmydayaway.livejournal.com

You'd have to speak to a copyright/trademark lawyer - they'd be the only ones able to speak with any certainty on the subject.

From my understanding, you'd be able to trademark/copyright your logo itself, but that would not copyright/trademark your character itself.

How was it ripped off? Just curious, I'd like to see examples (you can send them privately).

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Thank you for the advice
By chance do you happen know if there would be a difference if the character was used to represent a business for multimedia art(Fursuits, animations, comics, etc similar to the way Disney is able to sue for likenesses of their characters?

The character being ripped off is not the issue at hand, I am simply asking advice in general.

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ljmydayaway.livejournal.com

I think this read should help: http://www.ivanhoffman.com/characters.html

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That's what I thought. The person cannot steal the character but if he or she changed a few aspects of the character, then if I'm not mistaken, nothing can be done. That's how companies get away from putting 'familiar' characters in their advertisements, selling them.etc (ex. Dora the Explorergirl) or Dr. Peper instead of Dr. Pepper as seen in South Park.

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That would fall under parody, no?

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The second example, yes, but not the first :) But forgot about parody, lol!

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fionacat.livejournal.com

Parody is a defence which has to be proven, possibly in a court of law.

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silvertales.livejournal.com

In very general overview terms, true, legally defensible trademarks require filing with the trademark office and paying the requisite fee. It is not cheap to create a trademark, nor is it cheap to defend one, and you are legally required to defend trademark infringements or you lose the right to defend it in the future.

I highly recommend consulting an intellectual property attorney, as they'd be able to sit down and go over everything you need to do.

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Thank you so much, this helps a lot.

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copper-curls.livejournal.com

Other posters seem to have covered the main items, but just to remind you that copyright and trademark can differ in subtle ways from one country to another. I'm not sure about trademark, but an example on copyright is differences in copyright lengths. For example, while Canada and the US are both signatories to the Berne Convention on copyright and their respective national copyright laws meet the requirements of that convention, IIRC, the US recently enacted legislation to extend the period of copyright further. So it's entirely possible for something to be copyright in the US but not in Canada. As for trademark, to the best of my knowledge, trademarks must be registered in each nation where you do business; if you don't, you can't claim infringement in that country. As with others, I am by no means a lawyer so get professional advice, but if you anticipate doing business outside your home country, it's another question to ask.

ETA: Something else - I don't know about the US, but I'm reasonably certain that in Canada, trademarks have to be registered on a province-by-province basis, for example. This is why intellectual property lawyers make bucketloads of money :-)

Edited Date: 2012-04-27 12:37 am (UTC)

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ikirouta-fox.livejournal.com

"---trademarks must be registered in each nation where you do business; if you don't, you can't claim infringement in that country."

This is correct, I checked all the laws some time ago. If you register a trademark in USA it is registered ONLY in USA and nowhere else. You will have to register it in every country separately and that is extremely expensive.

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shukivengeance.livejournal.com

Yes it is true, and it leads to some very interesting situations. Take the Sherlock novels for example, there is quite a mess regarding the copyright for Conan Doyle's material since it is public domain in some countries and not in others.

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Be careful here. If someone created their own original pictures of "your character", a DMCA filing is probably not valid, and could cause you to be legally liable for a false claim. A character design is an idea, and only the concrete implementations of that idea are subject to copyright.

Trademarks must usually be applied to something you are selling or providing as a service. The basis of their justification is that by using the particular mark, someone will be passing their goods off as yours. A watermark works as a trademark. A character design is more dubious (the name of the character might be fine, though).

If you seek to protect the non-functional features of a functional item (such as a fursuit) from duplication, you might want a design patent (//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent) instead.

Speaking more generally, if nobody's making money off it, and no measurable harm has occurred, it may be hard to get the law involved.

Edited Date: 2012-04-27 12:39 am (UTC)

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Thorn had said above that the character was a mascot for multimedia art. Such as fursuit making, animations, and comics.

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From here (http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/3401829/), though, it looks like the goal is to protect a fictional species, i.e. an idea, not a specific character used to advertise or identify material in interstate commerce.

If someone comes up with a chimera and calls it a draconequus (http://mlp.wikia.com/wiki/Discord), that does not grant exclusive rights that would prevent others from creating characters of that species. If the name "draconequus" is trademarked, they just can't call it a draconequus (in the classes of trade covered by the registration).

Edited Date: 2012-04-27 01:17 am (UTC)

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I don't see why you felt the need to comment on her journal as well? In this Artists Beware entry it is specifically about the CHARACTER and not the SPECIES.
Just a comment here was enough, it seems a bit rude of you to go over there like that imo.

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Something was wrong on the Internet. Many appeared to be unaware of the truth, and it is my sacred duty to enlighten them.

More seriously, the whole concept has irritated me for some time. There are seven billion people in the world, and that's just counting the live ones. Chances are, one of them has thought of whatever it was before you. (Most furs also wilfully ignore this when the species was created by a corporation, even if it is legally protected in some fashion.)

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Uhh if you dont like it...dont look? I'm pretty sure millions of people made similar characters before Mickey Mouse, but he's a trademarked mascot for Disney.

You're being extremely rude.

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I respectfully disagree. I do not think my comment on FA was rude. It was informative and to the point, as was the artist's reply there.

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In what you had just said to me? That was pretty rude. I was trying to explain something to you and you felt the need to mock me.

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No, I didn't. I wasn't thinking about you at all. If anything, I was mocking my own actions.

While this post was about the character, the one on FA was about the concept of an "open species", and so my post there was about that concept as well. I also believe it is the issue which triggered this post; the context is relevant to the discussion.

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No, it's not the issue that had triggered the post at all. They are completely unrelated.

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Alright, I'm freezing this here as the back and forth of 'you were rude' 'nuh uh!' is a little much and rather off topic. Please don't continue this discussion.

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excessdenied0.livejournal.com

Dude, the character you use in most of your avatars on this site is a Norn. A species that legally belongs to Creatures Labs.
Not to start a fight, but as far as things that are wrong on the internet, don't you think you might be a bit hypocritical here?

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I was thinking about that when I said it; however, whatever such rights there are were specifically disclaimed by the creators for non-commercial use. This resulted in an explosion of unofficial norn breeds (http://creatures.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Unofficial_Norn_Breeds) (among other things), of which mine is one (http://www.creaturesvillage.com/wafuru/e/kai.html).

The point I was trying to make is that I don't need to go to either CL or the breed creator if I want to commission a picture of my character - regardless of rights - because you can't "legally own" a whole species; just specific depictions of them; or their names/similar depictions when used to mark a product; or substantially similar depictions if protected by a design patent.

The issue I had with was that the typical position of fans is not logically consistent - some argue for ownership of their own species while copying others. (This is not true for everyone in the fandom.)

Edited Date: 2012-04-27 03:38 am (UTC)

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excessdenied0.livejournal.com

Creatures Labs is very open to the creation of fan-content for their games, that's true. However, your point above(before you edited it out) was that characters are almost never original because they may resemble ideas already thought of by one or more of the population, past or present.
Frankly, the hypocrisy had nothing to do with legalities. Just because you had permission to use another person's ideas and expand on them, does not mean that your derivative is original.
In fact, to expand on that, your fan-norn is certainly a substantially similar depiction because it uses original game sprites.
I don't see how your argument is even relevant to the original post, or why you're still trying to prove something by arguing further here, and editing the crap out of your comments/replies. The OP didn't ask how not to legally protect an idea, she asked what ways she actually could protect it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think editing your own posts and going outside of A_B from a post to make post-related comments are both against the community guidelines. It's a lot easier to debate when you can go back and change what you said. ;)

Anyway... Just my opinion as an observer. This is getting a bit off-topic so I'm gonna stop here.

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leahtaur.livejournal.com

Editing the actual journal post to add info is allowed; editing to remove is not. I don't think there is anything against editing your own comments, only deleting. People edit their comments here all the time.

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Editing to get rid of typos and the like is fine, and we don't have a solid rule against editing your comments, but if you break the rules in a comment and then edit it to try to remove that, you'll still get a warning if we saw what it was before, so that won't save you.

IE, don't think you can go 'Blah blah blah u jerk' so that they get to see it, but then you edit it out in hopes a mod won't see what you did. We totally will, most of the time, and you'll still get in trouble.

And yes, you can't edit the actual entry to remove information, only to add.

Hopefully that clears that up!

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I typically edit a comment when I realize I haven't made the point I actually intended to make. I admit, it happens a lot - I'm an editor, so I'm picky! Unlike an initial post, you can't edit a comment after it has replies, so I don't think it greatly affects debate.

To address your point: My character is absolutely a substantially similar depiction, albeit with some original characteristics (mostly history and personality) but because I am not using it to pass my own goods off as those of Creatures Labs, and because it is not protected by a design patent, it is not prohibited.

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leahtaur.livejournal.com

Just to put it out there: I don't think Greenreaper was rude at all. I read his comment as being factual and offered without anger or rudeness. If OP is indeed curious about this topic, Greenreaper's comment may have helped him/her.

To address something you said further down, the two topics seem very related to me. I don't see how the OP could have made this A_B post without having the topic of that journal post in mind, or vice versa.

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It says right in the entry that they are not related and then she had replied to Greenreaper saying that she was rethinking keeping "thornbeasts" as a species. She is asking this question because she is rethinking that, and not because she wants to copyright/trademark the species.

Edit: I also wanted to say that it's not the comment I found rude, it's the fact that they felt the need to post basically the same thing on Thornbeast's post. It's a bit repetitive and paired with the comment he left for me makes it look extremely rude imo considering that he had already had a bias against posts and things like this.

Edited Date: 2012-04-27 11:16 am (UTC)

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leahtaur.livejournal.com

I guess I disagree then. He may be biased against posts like this but he has remained civil; it could be said that others have a bias FOR posts like this. That's just what happens when people engage in discussion and offer up opinions. Bias is unavoidable.

Despite what OP says, the two issues seem at least indirectly related to me, if not directly. A couple of the OP's comments have seemed like they are trying to steer the issue away from certain areas when they are still valid discussion points -- which is fine, that's not wrong especially in an advice post, but I don't think it would be considered too off-topic to discuss the details of what happened, for example. I understand not wanting to point fingers in a non-beware post but I think that Greenreaper bringing up the journal sheds new light on the circumstances of what happened, which allows us to give more relevant advice to the OP.

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splatterhouse.livejournal.com

The part noting the entry wasn't related wasn't initially there.

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marus-puppy.livejournal.com

I get that you and Thorn are friends (or partners? I remember her character in context with your post on Falvie and thought you said something along those lines,) but I think that you're being a bit more hostile than is warranted for the situation. Thorn seems perfectly capable of correcting the confusion as to what she's asking and has already done so in other comment threads. Just relax.

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neolucky.livejournal.com

Personally, I think it was just pointless and a bit rude to jump into OP's unrelated journal and interject their personal opinion on the matter, then turn around and point it out in this post (it felt snarky at that). Thats what I found rude, and felt was against the rules at that.

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serious-mccoy.livejournal.com

"Extremely rude"? I've been baffled this whole exchange as to how Greenreaper was being hostile or anything- his points have seemed entirely relevant to me, as I'm just watching. Everyone's going to enter discussions with their own biases- the fact that someone states a conflicting 'bias' doesn't automatically make it rude.

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fuzzwolfie.livejournal.com

After looking over the comments and such, I think you may be best off taking your concept and keeping it as a singular one-of-a-kind character.

It's obvious this character/species is highly personal to you, and you are protective of her. By limiting it to a single character, you will help eliminate people wanting to make spin-offs more so than if she was representative of a species. That plus a polite message telling others to keep their paws off should do the trick. (Well, for the most part, anyway.)

Also, I'm not sure how much you can gain by trademarking her. Unless someone like Disney or Pixar is trying to steal her, you will probably end up losing time and money with very little to show. Not to mention as stated above, you HAVE to defend the character every time it is used without permission, otherwise your trademark will be useless.

My 2 cents.

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copper-curls.livejournal.com

If my lay understanding of trademark laws is correct, there also needs to be, well, trade being done using that mark, because the point of trademark is to protect against business losses caused by deliberate or accidental infringement of one's business identity. If one isn't doing business, then by definition there can be no loss incurred. And, as you note, in order to protect against that infringement, the trademark holder MUST defend it or risk having a court decide the trademark has been abandoned. Those are two reasons why Disney is so adamant about taking even fan art to the courts; they make far too much money to risk any decision that might allow someone else to make money off Mickey, Donald, etc.

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