Question about copyrighted material
In one of the other money threads manwhore suggests boosting an artists audience by doing fan art of popular media and getting involved in those particular communities. How does copyright infringement fall into that. All I found so far is that doing anything up that alley is copyright infrigement and they do pursue certain cases, but if your just selling iphone cases on ebay odds are you won't be pursued.
So is it ok to do so long as you don't make money from the actual sale of the copyrighted material, just use that as free material? Or can you sell say a painting of a cartoon character without getting sued by disney? And are t-shirts/physical products in this same category? Do "parodies" have an affect?
Ive started to theme/brand the stuff I make and was thinking about starting to sell works/tshirts/photobooks
You're just randomly grabbing stuff and throwing it all together. You're talking about taking their work/art and selling it, then talking about creating the art yourself. Completely different things. If you're making "inspired" art based on their work they probably won't have an issue with it but they could probably choose to if you started making millions. If you're trying to take Mickey Mouse and stick it on a t-shirt you better be selling it on a street corner.
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Ok cool. That answers it perfectly, I was all over the place because I wanted the broad view but you answer covers my question
Companies like Lucasfilm make shittons of money off of licensing, probably more on that than they make on the actual movies, and they defend that with a vengeance, because if they didn't, any old schmuck would sell T-shirts with their images and the people buying the licensing rights wouldn't make any money and would stop buying the rights.
There are artists like J. Scott Campbell who do stuff like comic or Disney inspired work and his art is on calendars and stuff, and I'd guess that "inspired" is fine.