Selling renditions of artwork - Yay or Nay?

[Moogled]

Hey fellas, something just got me thinking lately. Alot of the talented sculptors here on the forum are asked to sculpt commissions of characters that were not created by them. However, the pose and time towards creating an art piece can be immense.

Would you guys consider it illegal if you took "commissions" to do renderings of an already existing art piece? I think the difference between redoing art and sculpting is that the sculpt is only identical by copyright name and the pose is a product of the sculptor's hard work.

Art and sculpting both have time put towards them but I think this would be a good topic to investigate. What do you guys think?

[risingstar]

Cover recreations are done all the time.
The good artists always add their own touch to it to make it look extra special.
However, I do have an issue with doing the same cover recreation commission for a bunch of different people.

[demonhunter]

I think this is debated a lot before across the internet and still is.

Technically, in my layman mind's understanding is that I cannot draw Spider-Man and sell the artwork. Whether or not the Spider-Man was based on the cover of Amazing Spider Man Issue 203 or not. The core of the matter is that Spider-Man and his image is owned by Marvel and copyrighted. Therefore, we are not allowed to draw him without Marvel's consent.

But there is also fairuse. I can draw my own fan art of Spiderman and post it on my website or fansite and even create fan fictions about him. However, if I am benefitting a lot from this as in my site becomes immensely more popular than Marvel's own website, or I'm benefitting in other ways, you can bet Marvel or the copyright owner will step right in immediately. Even if I'm not beneffiting immensely, they can still step in.
Case in point, there was this guy who created a diamond shaped logo for a football team/player t-shirt. It was a diamond with a P inside instead of S. DC immediately sent that guy a lawyer letter telling him to stop production of the shirts, destroy or remaining stocks, stop collecting money from selling them etc etc. Basically, DC told the guy that you can't use something that resembles my Superman S icon.

However, I noticed that the Japanese character companies seem to close one eye to all the fan works out there. They have this culture called doujinshi(I hope I spelled that right). Doujinshi or doujins are like fan made manga comic books. They even have adult oriented representation of popular characters from Evangelion, DragonBall, Naruto etc etc. Furthermore, they sell these at conventions in Japan and on the Internet. So far, I haven't heard any of them getting lawyer letters or being sued.

Another case in point is that of the sculptor named Mitsumasa Yoshizawa in Japan. He is a fantastic sculptor. He first made his own sculpts of popular video game characters from Street Fighter, Guilty Gear and Evangelion, casted them as model kits and sold them at Anime/Manga conventions in small quantities. Later, legit companies like Max Factory and Kaiyodo even picked up his works officially and produced prepainted/preassembled PVC statues of his previous works that he sold.

[Moogled]

How would you see the prevalence of sculpting here at SF?

I am not sure if the sculptors have licenses to produce kits of copyrighted characters, but the general consensus has been that Marvel/DC/Others will generally overlook such minute details unless substantial monetary gain was involved.

At the same time, I disagree a little bit with demonhunter's conception of copyright. While I can admit that the representation of a character is owned by X company, it places too much emphasis on what others can't do as opposed to the limits of what can be done using a copyrighted image.

I have a friend who works in design and I quote, vis a vis, the following: the rule behind copyright is that it needs to be 30% different and the 30% can be anything - difference in pose, coloration, or shading. I am not sure how accurate his claim is and I am just going by word of mouth.

I can probably pump out a fairly accurate comic pinup in about 7 hours nonstop and the imagination of selling it has given rise to this question.

There is also a very talented member here on SF (patman) who does pyro artwork. I wonder if he can sell his representations/renditions of comic art just as sculptors sell statues and garage kits of copyrighted characters.

[TheTiablo]

What about customized characters a player makes from their videogame? For example like on that City of Heroes game, and I created my character. Am I allowed to sell him? Or my Tauren from World of Warcraft?