How come noone sued fanartist on patreon yet?

[silencelibrarian]

Fanartist making money off patreon seems to be a clear abuse of copyright law

Just wondering, how come the copyright holder hasn't filed anything toward these fan artist?

afraid of fan backlash?
or the lawyer fee to file DMCA takedown just not worth it?
cos most of these people don't make enough for the copyright holder to come after
although there are those who are obviously making a killing off it,
biggest obvious example is those top artists of deviantart, those who shall not be name,
cos their fans will scream at us for doing so

isn't it inethical for a company the size of patreon to let this run rampant?
their policy didn't seems like it encourage it, unless its 'fair use'
but that terms just confuses me, how is drawing naked copyrighted characters having sex a 'fair use'???

thoughts?

[MidZM]

I don't know a whole lot about the whole "Fair Use" and Copyright stuff but I I'm pretty sure fan-art of any kind (As long as credit is given to the original creator/company) falls under the fair use policy, as for making money off of it, Patreon is made in a way so that the money people receive are basically donations, people don't HAVE to pay money to see said persons art, they want to because they like/love the art created by that person. I'm not sure how donations fall into the whole copyright thing but I don't believe donations violate some of those laws.

It's not like they're stealing already created art by the company/creator and saying "This is what I made!!!1!11 Give me money for it!!1!!11!!"

If anyone has better knowledge of the subject feel free to correct me

[joannekwan]

Well suing is probably the last resort. Companies will usually ask the creators to take down the offending materials first.

And it depends on the copyright holder, I think most big companies don't care if it's just fanart, even if the artists are profiting from it, because the fanart isn't directly competing with their own product. For example, say someone creates and sells fanart of Overwatch characters, Blizzard isn't likely to put a stop to it because they don't deal in art pieces, they deal in games. Now if some people made a game using Blizz assets, modifying them slightly, and started selling that game, then that would be an issue. It's actually happened with a Chinese company a year ago.

But then you have companies like Nintendo who are very sensitive to people using their characters. I heard about a tumblr that produced porny pics of Nintendo characters and Nintendo shut them down. Nintendo is notorious for flagging copyright claims at a drop of a pin, they will file a copyright strike on youtube against people reviewing their games who use in-game footage fairly. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Patreon has it in their ToS discouraging people from using fanart as their selling point, but there are so many creators on there Patreon can't police them all.

[Amecha]

From what I've seen (which I could totally be wrong) the majority of fanart Patreons are offering tutorials and other how-to's and aren't receiving payment for the fanart, but for the "education".
Fair use is basically allowed "...for purposes such as criticism, news reporting, teaching, and research..."

I mean technically that falls under fair use, even though I'm sure a company would be capable of challenging it it may just not be worth the trouble. Also considering that for the artist, even if they got hit with a DMCA they could easily just switch to other copyrighted/trademarked characters that aren't owned by the company that issued the DMCA and now it's a non-issue. Also, in the worst case scenario these artist could just switch to all original characters, or use their commissioned pieces as tutorials without really suffering any major loss of followers/pledgers. The fans came because of the fanart, but they typically stay for the art so even if it is sort of legally grey it's a solid method of building a following and they aren't really directly harming the company that owns the trademark/copyright.

Most companies just ignore it either way. It costs time, money, and public opinion to go after small creators so its often just not worth it. As long as the company can claim ignorance to a trademark violation their trademark won't be threatened. They only ever really go after these artists when the artist gets way too much attention and become impossible to ignore. (Basically what happened with the My Little Pony Fighting is Magic fiasco.)

[silencelibrarian]

this whole 'donation' thing still makes money off something that someone else's created though?
cos technically these artists get money in exchange of drawing these characters, which they don't own
wouldn't that technically buying and selling?

and they will never get to that near million of dollars if it were their original creation, they just ride the wave of the popularity

@joannekwan I guess it depends on the creator...
I understand patreon cannot police them all, but one or two of the top $$$ creators of patreon are clearly in this category and I highly doubt patreon does not notice what they do, more likely they turn a blind eye

@Amecha yah, it is tutorial alright, but still, I still don't think they will ever reach the $$$ they get without the selling point of existing copyrighted character
I mean I like looking at fanart myself, I think the fans can always offer something that the originals doesnt, but with the amount of $$$ of a few of these artists on patreon, I felt like it's clearly an abuse of copyright law.
In the beginning I'm sure they draw it out of love of the characters, but with the $$$ involved, I highly doubt the motivation is pure love these days

[MidZM]

When think of the donations I have in my head (Not like Cancer Research or Animal Abuse) I kind of look at it like a guy on the street playing "Hey There Delilah" with a hat or case on the ground and passing people will sometimes drop money in the hat or case because they like how well they play or feel sorry for them.

Would you report the guy to the Plain White T's because he's making small amounts of money off of their song?
I understand what you're saying about people gaining large amounts of money from copyrighted material, and yeah I might not be a fan of someone using my art/characters to make large amounts of money, but if they linked it back to me and said "Hey guys this is where and/or what the original is" I'd be extremely happy just because someone likes my art and characters enough to create a fan-art of them.

[shazzbaa]

this whole 'donation' thing still makes money off something that someone else's created though?cos technically these artists get money in exchange of drawing these characters, which they don't own
wouldn't that technically buying and selling?

Though I don't do this myself, I'm actually a big fan of the idea of patreon being used this way, to be honest. The idea of just saying "I'm sitting around drawing my little pony fanart, and I'll continue to do that; if you enjoy my work and want to help me to be able to continue to create work that I can't sell just for the beauty of it existing, please pledge to my patreon and I'll make a custom sketch/custom avatar/create a tutorial as thanks" is really kind of beautiful to me.

I'm sure there are versions of this that could get messy -- this is more about my feelings on how I wish things could be than about the legal ramifications, and I don't know what actual lawyers would do with this situation if it came down to an actual legal battle. But the idea of it is wonderful.

I don't agree with the idea that fanartists are somehow "cheating" when gaining popularity by tapping into figures we already care about. But I'm also not quite comfortable with the selling of fanart of other people's intellectual property as being casually acceptable.... so this patreon method appeals to me so much, because it's not Selling Copyrighted Characters but it IS financially supporting folks who create fanart. I would love for it to be legally possible.

[silencelibrarian]

this is an interesting thought, thank you for sharing, it opens up my mind to different kind of opinions.

@MidZM I guess at the end I also do not care if some little guys make $20 off some bootleg tshirt or something like that. Kinda like those small artist tables at anime convention and stuff,
but the ones I'm referring here are not making peanuts of fanart, they actually managed to be visible in top patreon of all category for drawing fanart.
Patreon recently make it so you can hide your earnings, but before that it was between US$12-50k per month drawing fanart, (any of you from dA knows who I'm talking about) and I'm just wondering if the original manga artist which work is based off get anywhere around that?

I guess you can argue that their work is not directly competing with the original creator

[UncleVlad]

Here is what i've learned over the years:

First, the vast majority of companies/creators don't want you sellig physical objects using thier work- Prints, tees, etc.

That being said, you aren't buying prints on Patreon- just access to a creator's work. I've heard tales of people at anime cons being made to pack up and leave b/c all they had was fan art and a complaint was made concerning copyright. Its a big part of why anime cons discourage it- but a lot depends on how broad or narrow a copyright is written.

Also, content owners can ask and have legal power to get anything they deem destructive to thier brand or image removed- hence why Nintendo cracks down on porny fanart of their characters. They want to have a family friendly image, and they consider that kind of thing damaging to said image and damaging to thier brand.