So it's a new week and I've already noticed a trend in the new helpdesk inquiries so I'm going to address it here in my journal and perhaps later on this week in the news to help clarify things for those who need it.

The issue involves, once again, a type of fan art; not the fan art which is created from scratch mind you but rather the type in which official images are reused.

Now to be clear (and because someone will no doubt point this out), all fan art can be considered to be a type of copyright infringement due to the fact that if it's popular enough to have tens of thousands of people losing their minds over it you can pretty much bet everything about it has been copyrighted and trademarked for licensing and merchandising.

But having said that, just about everybody knows that the majority of companies tolerate the existence of fan art; some even encouraging it to some minor extent.

The issue I want to address today involves where this tolerance or encouragement comes up against the deviantART submission agreement and copyright policy.

Now again, "original" fan art created by your own hand from scratch isn't really involved in the reason for this being written; providing that the companies continue their tolerance of their fan following we're all quite content to welcome original fan art into the galleries here at deviantART.

The issue comes with the type of fan art which involves the use of video game sprites, production stills, screenshots, and scans and any other piece of official work you can think of off the top of your head.

Now, anyone even passingly familiar with our policies here knows that we don't allow anyone just to grab something made by someone else and use it in a deviantART submission; we require that you go to the source and get proper permission and we've even outlined in our FAQ exactly what sort of permission you need.

It's all pretty straight forward until someone actually tries to get permission from something like a video game company; Sega for example.

Now I turn to video game companies specifically because they cultivate more of a relationship with their consumers than say, a motion picture company, and they can be viewed as perhaps more permissive. As a result I think most people would find it easier to shoot an email off to Sega than they would to Disney.

Now I've been involved in this area for six years now and I've seen a lot of people try to contact a lot of companies and you don't always get the same results and even the same company can give you different responses year to year and a lot of the times you get a "template" response rather than any real human interaction.

Providing that you aren't rejected out of hand you might actually receive a response which gives you permission to reuse the official material for your fan art and I've seen a score of kids do a few cartwheels and back flips over it and dump a ton of submissions into their deviantART gallery.

And then much to their dismay it all gets deleted and when they present their email of permission they get told it's inadequate.

What I'm doing today is revealing why it's inadequate.

I've seen a lot of these emails and you can pretty much break them down the same way.

The emails almost always state that existing artwork or material can be used for personal artworks or a personal website providing it's not for profit.

The problem with this type of permission is that the company is granting you permission for use on a personal website in personal artwork.

The first major problem is that deviantART is not your personal website.

This is where that type of general permission breaks down and become inadequate.

In order to submit your works to deviantART you need to agree to our Submission Agreement and there is one particular clause in that agreement which I'll quote here;



Boiling away the legalese it means that you need to have permission to license the copyrighted material in your deviation in order for it to be on deviantART.

To go back to our example Sega needs to write a set of magic words which sound something like "Sega grants to (you) and (your) successors and assigns, the right to reproduce and distribute (whatever) on the deviantART.com website" or something else which makes it clear that you are legally able to do what the Submission Agreement requires you to do.

Quite honestly I've yet to see any company willing to grant a fan these types of legal rights or abilities because they are a much bigger deal than just telling some kid that it's alright to use Sonic the Hedgehog sprites on their personal website.