pretty hate machine
It doesn't matter if you're doing it for profit or not. You're still taking a copyrighted character design and using it without the copyrighter's permission. I was on my high school's lit/art magazine and that's one of the biggest problems we ran into. Even though our mag was completely non-profit, we still couldn't print the book with submitted fanworks simply because the artist didn't have permission to even draw that character in the first place. It didn't matter if it was a totally original design and it wasn't someone copying something freehand from a drawing. Doesn't matter if you say it's the property of so-and-so or not... Still makes it just as wrong if someone were to plagerize a story, or write a story using someone else's characters even though they might change the events a little. Things are copyrighted for a reason... to keep people from stealing their works or using it in inappropriate ways without the copyrighter's permission. It's something that's a little bit harder to enforce on the net.
@ PaRaNoIa X: *lol* Yep. I'm here too. ninja
@ PaRaNoIa X: *lol* Yep. I'm here too. ninja
True, you do indeed have a point. However, I highly doubt that any company or organization would go so far as to pull an Anne Rice* on the fandom.
The thing is, the biggest problem that we have is that copyright laws in Japan, as opposed to those in the United States, are rather different. In Japan, artists can make and sell doujinshi WITHOUT permission from the creators, and it is perfectly legal. You can't do the same thing in the U.S. without getting sued, unless you have permission from the creator. The doujinshi-ka (fancomic artists) who make money by creating fancomics of pre-existing characters and ideas are actually protected by Japanese law, and always state clearly credit the creator of the thing their doujinshi is based on. Things like doujinshi are actually how many artists start their careers before becoming full-fledged manga-ka, a good example being CLAMP.
If I tried doing that in the U.S. without permission, my a** would be grass. razz
However, what are fans who draw and write supposed to do if someone on the other side of the world in a different country decides to take their images and post it elsewhere? Do the same laws apply, or do the laws of the country where the other individual apply?
This is my biggest problem with it. You have more than one set of laws you could go by, but it's which one that could decide who gets in trouble. If I drew doujinshi for Final Fantasy VII, I would get in serious trouble for selling it, since I live in Washington state. If I had been a Japanese citizen living in Sapporo, then it'd be perfectly fine, hell, it'd be NORMAL.
Although, one of your last comments is all too true. Things such as law are extremely difficult to enforce on the World Wide Web. There are millions, perhaps a billion or so people that use it, from hundreds of different countries around the world. Downloading MP3's may be illegal, but millions of people still do it on a day to day basis.
And if I don't shut up now, I'll go way off topic and forget what I was talking about in the first place.
*'Anne Rice' - Basically, what happened was that Anne Rice, a renowned author who wrote many famous books, didn't like the idea of people writing fanfiction based off of her works. Therefore, she banned fanfiction concerning anything she wrote. This practically killed off a good portion of her fandom, and pissed off many of her loyal fans.
