Crafters and copyright
Yannow, I'm thrilled that so many crafters are making fannish stuff.
But every time I see someone I know (I'm not going to name names, but there's more than one person I know doing this) proudly post pictures of their versions of copyrighted stuff on Facebook to promote their businesses, I wonder just how long it's going to be before they get a cease and desist letter from some corporate lawyer types. Because once you stop making it for yourself and start making it for sale, you've crossed the fair use line and started breaking copyright law.
All those Avengers crafts? Those characters are copyrighted to Marvel.
All those Firefly/Serenity items? Fox owns the copyrights.
All those Dr. Who goodies? The BBC owns the copyrights.
Yep, those are all copyrighted shows/movies/books. You really ought to be thinking about licensing if you're going to be making money off of someone else's copyrighted characters and ideas.
And the worst part is, we've recently had the whole widely publicized crackdown where Fox sent cease and desist letters to people knitting Jayne hats for sale. So you'd think there would be a level of awareness out there. But no.
But every time I see someone I know (I'm not going to name names, but there's more than one person I know doing this) proudly post pictures of their versions of copyrighted stuff on Facebook to promote their businesses, I wonder just how long it's going to be before they get a cease and desist letter from some corporate lawyer types. Because once you stop making it for yourself and start making it for sale, you've crossed the fair use line and started breaking copyright law.
All those Avengers crafts? Those characters are copyrighted to Marvel.
All those Firefly/Serenity items? Fox owns the copyrights.
All those Dr. Who goodies? The BBC owns the copyrights.
Yep, those are all copyrighted shows/movies/books. You really ought to be thinking about licensing if you're going to be making money off of someone else's copyrighted characters and ideas.
And the worst part is, we've recently had the whole widely publicized crackdown where Fox sent cease and desist letters to people knitting Jayne hats for sale. So you'd think there would be a level of awareness out there. But no.