Hi there,
Whilst looking at sites to buy 2000ad art I happened upon someone selling t-shirts and other items with prints of my pictures on them (amongst other stolen artwork)..........what's the best approach to dealing with this?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/sirllamalot/collections/400732-comic-book?order=custom (https://www.redbubble.com/people/sirllamalot/collections/400732-comic-book?order=custom)
Cheers!
There's a way to report a single image (click on the image and then at the bottom is a link saying report inappropriate or copyright content).
From the looks of it, it seems far hard to report for copyright infringement than it seems to be to upload something that infringes copyright and I that's by design, as the easiest way to crowdsource is to let people flaunt copyright laws.
-PJ
Having said that, while he's infringing your copyright (by uploading and making your art available for print) he's also breaking trademark rights that Rebellion hold, which may end up being what does for him in the end.
(Technically all fan art breaks trademarks, but as a rule it only gets in to slippery territory if you're selling materials and making a profit off the trademark - as he is here with Dredd items that you've drawn but he's selling)
-PJ
Thanks PJ. Yeah, as well as feeling a little affronted by someone profiting from something they didn't produce, he doesn't appear to care less about profiting from licensed property. Git.
I've had someone sticking my drawings on stuff on Redbubble before. The site apologised and removed it within a couple of hours of me reporting it, so you shouldn't have too much trouble.
Cheers, I have reported it to them, will see how it goes.
Yeah, one of the photos I took of Greg Staples as Dredd ended up on a t-shirt, I passed it onto Rebellion to deal with since it's their IP, but it's really shit they shouldn't have to deal with.
Depressingly I saw Steve Dillon arguing with some t-shirt IP thieves on twitter a couple of months back about some Preacher T's.
Some of the more clever, self-created stuff I guess falls under parody or fair use I guess, if 2000AD can have Ronald McDonald et al. Sauce for the goose etc.
But the majority of it is lazy opportunism.