Waiting on Godot...
Gender: Female
Location: New Zealand
Rank: Ace Attorney
Joined: Mon Jul 21, 2008 9:23 am
Posts: 2404
Pierre wrote:
Also is there a little copyright symbol up in the top right hand corner?
I don't think you can put that there and when using copyrighted characters.
Pierre- It's common for new artists to not understand copyrights, and get all panicked about people stealing art, saying it's their own. You spend hours doing a picture- you don't want someone else to say it's their own hard work. Alot of new artists do this to their art even though it's not correct.
Ravensep- I see what you're trying to do with the copyright logo. You're worried someone might steal it, right? And others do this, right? Let me explain rights to art here as best as I can and how I understand it.
- Under Creative commons, no one is legally allowed to take your artwork and sell it without changing a significant proportion of the art. There are a few conditions with Creative commons where you can use the art for things, but essentially, the law has a blanket protection for images on the internet. I don't fully understand Creative commons but if someone takes your art and says it is yours, you have the right to tell them to take it down cause it's not. This is automatic. No need for a copyright logo. You should put your name on the image though. Makes life simpler. Most people are just reblogging art on the net so the likelihood of theft for fanart is actually VERY low. IT happens though and the fandom fights it when it does.
- You do not own Phoenix or Miles. Capcom actually paid money to say that they own these characters. You can parody them for profit, but theoretically, fancomics and selling fanart is illegal. I dare say that Capcom don't care though cause it feeds their market and makes their games popular. This is to say if you COULD put a copyright logo on something, this is not the image. Capcom can't replicate your art without your permission but they can ask you to take it down as they own the right to the characters being portrayed.
Now the big issue- theft. Copyright logos don't stop theft. Some thieves are real lazy and make a rectangle of colour to cover signatures which are obviously a different colour. In this case it'll be less obvious cause the background doesn't vary in colour much. They do this in hope that the viewer doesn't care enough to find the owner. To make it less appealing to steal, you can put a watermark on the image (which is ugly and on an image that doesn't have complex rendering it's easy to remove anyway), you can incorporate a signature into the image that is hard to spot (this is what most pro artists do), or you can just post a low resolution low quality image which will look really crap in print cause frankly, stopping theft is REALLY hard. You should be more worried about people printing your image than stealing it cause thieves get caught eventually. You don't want them to make money off you though.
I hope this clarifies a few things for everyone reading this.