- Joined
- Jun 22, 2015
Actually, the legality of fan art is highly questionable. The only reason it isn't pursued more often is that it is rather stupid for a company to prosecute copyright infringement for something that isn't even costing them any money, and in the process, infuriates their most dedicated fans, that is, the very people who promote their actual IP and buy tons of it.
Fan art, like any other derivative work, has to pass the fair use test to be noninfringing, and that is whether it is commercial or it isn't. Whether a derivative work is commercial is only directly relevant to one of the four factors of the fair use test. The test balances these: "the purpose and character of your use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and the effect of the use upon the potential market." http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/#sthash.iLQc2TaP.dpuf
Many fan works are, definitely, transformative enough, that is, they have enough original content, that they wouldn't fail on that part, but because fair use is a multi-factor balancing test, commercial exploitation of them would make it more likely that they wouldn't pass.
There isn't a bright line rule on it, though, and a minimally transformative "fan art" piece could easily be infringing with or without commercial motive.
It's more a matter of letting it slide than that there is any explicit protection of fan art.
In this case, with stuff grabbed from Google Images being used in a shopfront sign (a very bad practice by the way), both the original owners of Crash Bandicoot and the fan art guy have a legitimate legal claim against whoever made that sign and is using it for commercial purposes.
I just think it's kind of douchey actually to do it while being on somewhat questionable legal ground yourself. The damages in a copyright claim are generally monetary. That is, this guy would be claiming he would otherwise be making money off someone else's IP had it not been diverted into the pockets of this sign guy.
It's very similar to the Blue Balled Bear's whining about people using his own shitty art to criticize him and complaining about it being "stolen."
The legality of fan art is questionable only if its intended purpose is plagiarize, diminish, supplant, bersmirch, or take profit away form the original copyright holder. Most fan art is done as a sincere display of the artist's love and admiration for the characters being rendered in said fan art. Copyright law is there to protect the copyright holder from real insidious uses and plagiarization of original work such as piracy, forgery or missappropiation.
Any fan artist that produces a piece of art as a means to say "I love this" and do so for free are completely in the clear because copyright law wasn't meant to dissuade people from expressing such sentiments. As you state, there is the "fair use" doctrine to allow for such wiggle room. Nitro's (Ben Hickling) fan art of Coco Bandicoot is transformative just by the very fact that he renders the character in a manner that is different from the games and because it is in a different medium. Coco Bandicoot is a 3D character in a videogame, an interactive digital medium, Nitro's is a pictoric 2D painting or illustration. A copyright claim could be filed against Nitro if he were producing a videogame with Coco Bandicoot as a playable character that he would be selling it for profit.
I'm not sure what exactly was the image that was plagiarized (something with a cat) so I don't have enough info to know to whom it would correspond to make the corresponding claim.
I would have to disagree that this situation is in any way similar to Dobson's loathsome moaning. As you stated before, "fair use" plays a big role when it comes to such transformative works and "criticism, review and parody" are some of the best examples of "Fair use" because this fall within freedom of speech. Just as two or more people can freely discuss and speak about Crash Bandicoot, review it and parody it, so an fan artist can express freely his thoughts and ideas with art instead of words.
Dobson claiming that someone is "stealing" his art for the mere act of posting it online, as is, without modification or misappropriation just shows how little he understands "fair use" especially when more often than not, his art is posted in forums like this precisely for the expressed purpose of review, critique and parody.
My apologies to the forum mods if this post is mostly off-topic.