Crunchyroll Gave COPYRIGHT NOTICES To Artists at Anime Expo...

Do you think the copyright notices are fair? Or is it harmful towards artists?

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[devnom]

Ah Crunchyroll the once piracy site turned legitimate & now subbing series with AI, legally sure they have a leg to stand, but morally they're a bad joke

[zooweamama]

The whole point of buying art from artists alley at anime conventions is that it’s fanart for anime??? First they mess up miku expo big time and now they attempt to ruin anime conventions like this? Crunchyroll and their desire to monopolize anything anime in the western world is genuinely disgusting and I hope they go under

[azurw]

Everyone keeps forgetting that crunchyroll use to be a site that pirated anime for people that decided to just go the corpo route and the current crunchyroll is really funimation just rebranded as crunchyroll so it’s really funimation rebranded doing this

[kalaski]

Crunchyroll is absolutely not harmed by artists selling merch. It’d only be an issue if it harmed their own profits, which it doesn’t. If they don’t want people to buy artists’ fan merch, they should make better official merch.

[YuJay]

Years and Years ago, I remember there was a law suit about a company trying to sue an artist over drawing copyright IPs, the IP holder lost the law suit because the Fan Art came under parody and wasn't a 1 for 1 copy of any Art or Material of the IP holder.

[NuigurumiVT]

okay that makes so much more sense that it was the exhibitor's hall. I was so mad because conventions are the ones bringing in fan artists so it feels unfair that that would happen. But yeah, typically fan merch can only be in artist alley

[baosia]

"Companies don't want Your money, they want ALL the money"

[GogglesVonAwesome]

These companies usually leave Artist Alley alone; IME, a lot of these companies go after sellers/artists in the Exhibitor's Hall, because it's expected that sellers in the Exhibitor's Hall will be selling officially licensed merchandise like figures and T-shirts and they likely don't want anyone to mistake fanmerch for officially licensed goods.

[begonestink]

Seeing them "protect" a series like Vampire Knight, which isn't as popular of a franchise anymore compared to the others, that was released in 2008, is crazy to me.
I might understand something like Sailor Moon but Vampire Knight? You serious? Because no one, not even Viz, sells merch from this series anymore, or hasn't in a while, so unless they're gonna start selling VK merch again it's ridiculous. This applies for other IP's too which they don't sell merch for anymore.

[aalice-Animation]

While I understand that selling art of their ip is technically illegal I still feel like it’s pretty shitty for big media brands to strike down small artists, They’re already making a lot of money I don’t see the point in striking down small artists who aren’t even making that much money in the first place. Legally they have the right to do that morally I feel like it’s a shitty thing to do.

[Brimikyu]

As long as they don't touch artist ally, it honestly makes sense. Exhibitors hall, from what I've always believed, weren't so much small artists (I personally consider 1-2 people working to make art small artists, beyond that it'd be a small business imo) but more like small businesses. If you have an etsy shop, IP Infringement can get your shop banned, so it honestly makes sense that small businesses in the exhibition hall could get in trouble if they do the same.

[gungral]

Next step, hand out copyright notice to cosplayers.

[zeroaction]

Alright let this get this out of the way: CrunchyRoll only bought the license to dub and create subs for anime or make merch.

They don't have the power to take down fan works since it is protected by the parody laws and the true IP holder is the Mangaken or Light Novel writer. In Japan whenever a big company wants to animate from a popular manga series they have to negotiate with the Artist using the publisher as a bridge to reach them. This also applies to Mangakens who wants to turn light novels into mangas.

With this new information they can only tell you to stop and that's it, they would have to contact the Mangaken or Light novel writer to take your stuff down but even then U.S laws protects fan arts because of the parody laws.

[AHylianWarrior]

Info: this has always been a thing because they're selling fanart mech in the WRONG area. It was basically a case of people selling fanart in the "original content only" section

[absolutecotton]

When artist make fanart, most of the time it is a deritive work, and if people buy someothing that isnt made by the orinal creators, its because its either bad quality or they dont have any merch. So these companies arnt really losing money because the customers werent gonna buy them anyways! They only reason why i could see someone copyright striking artist for selling fanart, is if its not a deritive work or hurts the orignal's reputation

[BriBreeBri]

Yes, VIZ was going around. They didn't give two shits about artist alley (and that's what the staff who was going around told us). It was the [exhibit hall] only. My friend got a strike for 2 pieces. Wasn't bothered, we took them down and went about our business. They're just doing their job.

That said, half of exhibit hall was also down in the artist alley Kentia Hall. But they were still "exhibit hall" booths. So these "small artist" were those who were exhibitors, NOT artist alley. They were NOT "small artist" if they had the means and ability to be apart of EXHIBIT HALL (of Kentia Hall)

[RobertStoll]

Case by case basis. There are for sure times where artists go too far (selling merch that harms brand image, uses AI, traces official art, directly competes with official projects, etc) where it may be warranted.

But there are definitely many times where they go overboard with it.

[idolshepherd]

Disney went after the guy who created Ghost Rider years ago for making his own figures. They slapped him with the laywer hammer now he can no longer say he created Ghost Rider legally and he can only sign licensed merch. BUT this had the huge backlash of people being afraid to make any disney fan art, and disney did not like that and came out to say that was OK and to keep making fan art. Basically it is good free advert for the IP holders but the unwritten agreement is that they generally look the other way as long it is not something they would make and sell themselves.

[davidcheek]

Transformative art is supposed to be protected under fair use. So if someone has truly made fan art, they shouldn't be getting copyright notices. I don't know who got notices, but if they took a shot from the anime, cleaned up the character in photoshop and printed tshirts, that wouldn't be "transformative" that would be a "copy" as in copyright. There is also Trademark infringement, which the twitter post addresses like avoiding using IP names and logos (Tm and R circles are a giveaway).

However, companies have been exceptionally greedy and bern trying to erode down fair use to nothing. YouTube's broken system isn't helping, and most people don't understand their rights.

[CHeroVT]

My only question is that paper about infringement is even legitimate. I saw it before on Twitter and due to the nature of the Internet, I always say don't believe everything you see.