The Legalities of Fan Art

Apparently, since this is an academic class, I still have to do work?? :/ What is this madness?

So to start off my research based part of the posts I will be referencing my fan-based craft tutorial blog, Parks and Recipes. 

This blog was created out of my need to connect with Parks and Recreation outside of the TV set. My sister is a huge fan of the show, and for her birthday I bought her two shirts from the NBC Universal Website 

These are the shirts if case you were wondering:

Here is where issues start to come in: Copyright. Parks and Recreation and all its related products are licensed by the NBC Universal company. I learned all about this in my Introduction to Media Studies as well as Learning From YouTube. It is a huge problem for fandom crafters, especially within the online environment.

I tried to avoid these issues. My first step in sneaking around this issue was to put in "inspired by". This suggests that the idea was from the copyrighted work, but the project itself was original and only inspired by, not taken from, the copyrighted material. This is my version of putting "unofficial" in front of my fandom projects.

Update: I messed up. Using "inspired by" does not save you from copyright issues

(https://www.etsy.com/teams/7718/questions/discuss/14552307/)

After a pretty quick google search, I found this wikipedia-type page that details the legalities of fan art and profit. Basically, you can't profit from copyrighted material if you are not the copyright owner. I'm pretty safe in a lot of these terms because I am not profiting from these blog posts, nor will I profit from any type of fan craft I design.

However, once an artist starts profiting off of a trademarked product, they are breaking copyright laws and treading into illegal territory. Even using the name in the title or the tags can result in copyright infringement if you are profiting from the project.

Good luck out there...the issues are murky and big companies can be cruel in regards to personal work with their trademarked symbols. In the end, these companies are after profits and they can and will shut you down for entering their territory. Tread carefully.

Further Reading:
 https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2010/05/13/the-messy-world-of-fan-art-and-copyright/

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2044685/i-almost-got-sued-for-knitting-a-firefly-hat-the-legal-risks-of-pop-culture-fan-art.html

http://www.craftsandcopyrights.com/faq.html