Recently I’m noticing a lot of artist on social media having a huge following and making a living creating art of copyrighted images. Whether they’re painting a companies logo, drawing a cartoon character, etc.
I was just wondering doesn’t this fall under copyright infringement? Especially seeing how a lot of these artists sell their work too.
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Drawing it for a video isn’t going to get you in trouble, drawing it and selling it definitely will.
Because they’re doing it in their own style (most of the time). When you draw art in your own style with your own special twist on things, it becomes your work. Sure it may be inspired by a certain character, but as long as you’re not claiming to be officially drawing that character you won’t run into as much trouble.
On top of that, it isn’t necessarily worth Disney or whatever companies time/money to go after these smaller artists, it just isn’t cost effective. Often if they have a real issue they’ll just send them a cease and desist letter in the hopes that that just scares the artist enough to where they stop on their own without having to go to court.
>I was just wondering doesn’t this fall under copyright infringement?
Maybe, it depends on specifics. But it hardly matters, unless they are trying to sell it at a large scale.
To get someone in trouble for this, a lot has to happen: They company that owns its, has to have its expensive ass lawyers, spend a lot of time drafting up legal documents, then file those legal documents with a court to sue the person to get them to stop, then a judge has to agree, find the person, ask them to stop, then if they dont stop, they have to go back to court… and you can see this gets pretty rough.
In reality, its just bad business to go after the small guys, these businesses generally won’t “endorse” using their material, but they treat it like free advertising.
as long as you aren’t using someone else’s art/logo/trademarked stuff and passing it off as your own, or using it to sell or trick people into thinking you are affiliated, then you are allowed to use aspects in art or satire.
you can’t get away with using mickey mouse on a t-shirt and selling it as a product that people might be tricked into thinking it’s affiliated with disney when it’s not, because you would be profiting off of someone else’s brand and “tricking” people.
you can however, design artwork using mickey mouse’s likeness satirically, for example mickey in the gutter with a bottle of booze in an attempt at making social commentary, since now you’ve transformed it enough so that people can tell it’s its own stand alone piece of artwork.
if people are just uploading videos or pictures of them drawing or painting stuff, then you can argue that they make their profit by demonstrating a skill for educational or performative reasons, and not by trying to sell products with copyrighted material on them
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