Annual Otakon Fan Art Restrictions Drama

[limpingpigeon]

Back in 2006, Otakon began restricting how much "fan art" could be sold at artist alley tables. I'm not going to go into the full history of the restrictions, but it's mostly been geared toward cracking down on artists who mass-produce prints and merchandise using trademarked characters for which they do not have legal licensing/permissions. This

Comments

[mizmoose]

I wonder if this is an attempt to curb what seems to be a new rash of art plagiarists. The last one I heard of seemed to be mostly tracing & copying fan art.

[limpingpigeon]

Possibly but I'm not sure. Tracing/Copying artwork to put on merchandise has pretty much always not been allowed. I think they're more concerned about copyright/trademark holders raising an eyebrow at artists in the alley who print up hundreds of bookmarks, buttons, and stickers of characters, albeit in a unique style to the official art. I have to admit that if I had a company that had actually paid for a license to put those characters on merchandise, I'd probably be a bit ticked off by that. Some of the larger cons completely banned "fan art" from their artist alleys in recent years. Otakon seems to still be trying not to do that (though according to their staff, their lawyers keep suggesting they do), but wants to make clear that the purpose of the Alley is not to sell knockoff, unlicensed merchandise.