At 07:16 PM 11/9/2004, Scrapper Black Dragon wrote:
>Who has copyright on Tabitha, TJA mascot?
Absolutely nobody. There is no such thing as Copyright on a character
under current copyright law. A character is a concept, a set of ideas that
form to make a copyrighted image or text, however the characters itself is
not subject to copyright, or any full IP Legal Protection unless
Trademarked. Trademarking is generally very expensive, and also only
covers the specific business uses that are trademarked. And even that does
not guarantee protection. (Considering that some of the toon parody on TJA
is of trademarked characters, for example. However, the parody both does
not decrease the market value of the mark in any quantifiable way, nor does
it infringe upon the specific realm of the given mark.)
The only protection that a character enjoys in our case is "Rabid Fan
Syndrome" protection, and "Courtesy" protection. The second is obvious:
It's just impolite to do something with somebody else's character without
permission. The first is the precept that if you are impolite enough, the
rabid fans will form a posse, hunt you down, and do horribly unpleasant
things to you. (Example: Ask anybody who has ever tried to draw any sort of
purple wolf-like dog or... heaven forbid... husky character, without
Huskee's permission. Several artistic lives have been ruined, and some
purple creatures reduced to "muave" or forced to have a species change by
the Rabid Fan Syndrome enforcement.)
Keeday? Coo.
Received on Tue Nov 09 2004 - 19:49:49 CST