9 minutes ago, whafrog said:

It doesn't work that way. Otherwise you'd have to "contact-trace" every idea anybody has ever had to find and pay off the "true source". Heck, by your logic, Lucas would owe Campbell for the Hero's Journey, and Campbell would owe all peoples everywhere for profiting off of a genetic/social trait common to all homo sapiens.

If you profit from specific works of art that feature content that is owned by Disney, then you need a license. If you get a job because you can draw Ahsoka really well, you don't owe anybody anything.

Legally, no. But in terms of what you used to get you where you are? Building a reputation, etc? Absolutely. That's why these complaints strike me as disingenuous. The fan artist is copying other people's work, too, and most definitely building their rep with that replicated work.

Just now, Stan Fresh said:

Legally, no. But in terms of what you used to get you where you are? Building a reputation, etc? Absolutely. That's why these complaints strike me as disingenuous. The fan artist is copying other people's work, too, and most definitely building their rep with that replicated work.

Well yeah. That is how you learn.

5 minutes ago, Daeglan said:

Well yeah. That is how you learn.

Sure. I'm not saying artists shouldn't create fan art. Being proprietary about your recreation of someone else's work is another thing.

Just now, Stan Fresh said:

Sure. I'm not saying artists shouldn't create fan art. Being proprietary about your recreation of someone else's work is another thing.

So it’s acceptable for the back cover artist to take a shortcut of utilizing the results someone else’s labor without permission, pass it off as his own, and get paid for it?

2 minutes ago, Stan Fresh said:

Sure. I'm not saying artists shouldn't create fan art. Being proprietary about your recreation of someone else's work is another thing.

Well it's their work, taken verbatim by someone else without crediting the original artist. If I draw an X-Wing from the ground up, working from a reference, that's different than someone taking my drawing of an X-Wing and then taking it verbatim and putting it in "their own" work. Legally, it is muddy. Ethically, I think it's pretty clear.

Especially when it is a freelancer using someone else's work to sell to the owner of the IP.

2 minutes ago, Nytwyng said:

So it’s acceptable for the back cover artist to take a shortcut of utilizing the results someone else’s labor without permission, pass it off as his own, and get paid for it?

I hate to break it to you but all art does that. look at have many rock riffs are Pacabell. Look at how many are Mozart.

Here's an important thing to remember. We can sit here all day, going back and forth on what we think is fair use, but only a judge can say "Yup, fair use" (and even one judge can render a different verdict from another) . The boundaries of what fair use is are kept purposely vague just so a judge can evaluate a work on a case by case basis. Now I'm not familiar with the original stolen art, so I'm guessing here with the four pillars of fair use:

* the purpose and character of your use.

Has the material taken from the original work been transformed by adding new expression or meaning? Was value added to the original by creating new information, new aesthetics, new insights, and understandings? One could argue that someone's interpretation of the juggernaut fits the criteria of new aesthetic. Plus depending on other factors like if the artist made the juggernaut look badass with the lighting and the background, that could add new meaning ("Badassery")

* the nature of the copyrighted work.

There is a stronger case of fair use if the material comes from a published work than an unpublished work. The scope of fair use is narrower for unpublished works because an author has the right to control the first public appearance of his or her expression. Clearly this is a published work, so we can tick this box

* The amount and substantiality of the portion taken

The less an artist takes, the more likely that they will be excused as a fair use. However, even if you take a small portion of a work, your copying will not be a fair use if the portion taken is the “heart” of the work. In other words, you are more likely to run into problems if you take the most memorable aspect of a work. For example, it would probably not be a fair use to copy the opening guitar riff and the words “I can’t get no satisfaction” from the song “Satisfaction.”

* The effect of the use upon the potential market.

And then there's "Does the copied work deprive the copyright owner of income or undermines a new or potential market for the copyrighted work." Depriving a copyright owner of income is very likely to trigger a lawsuit. This is true even if you are not competing directly with the original work.

This one is harder to judge than the other three factors. Occasional quotations or photocopies may have no adverse market effects, but reproductions of entire software works and videos can make direct inroads on the potential markets for those works. So we'd have to ask ourselves if the new work serves as a replacement for the old. If your purpose is research or scholarship (or in this case, fan art which Lucasfilm has been fine with in the past), market effect may be difficult to prove. If your purpose is commercial, then adverse market effect may be easier to prove.

Again, the judge has final say - but if I were this artist, I would be comfortable claiming fair use.

***EDIT***

Also, its important to separate copyright and trademark. Disney may have a trademark for individual ships/designs, but they cannot use another person's work even if that work is of their design.

1 minute ago, Desslok said:

Now I'm not familiar with the original stolen art

...dude.

10 minutes ago, Nytwyng said:

So it’s acceptable for the back cover artist to take a shortcut of utilizing the results someone else’s labor without permission, pass it off as his own, and get paid for it?

I'm saying a copier crying about getting copied is on thin ice, morally.

7 minutes ago, P-47 Thunderbolt said:

Well it's their work, taken verbatim by someone else without crediting the original artist.

The original artist is the designer of the Juggernaut.

7 minutes ago, P-47 Thunderbolt said:

Especially when it is a freelancer using someone else's work to sell to the owner of the IP.

I'm not saying the freelancer is free of blame. I'm saying this is a situation in which the complainer is coming off as a hypocrite. That doesn't absolve anyone else of blame.

12 minutes ago, Stan Fresh said:

I'm not saying the freelancer is free of blame. I'm saying this is a situation in which the complainer is coming off as a hypocrite. That doesn't absolve anyone else of blame.

How so? The “complainer” is taking exception not to the subject matter of the images, but to the final results of his labor being passed off as the final result of someone else’s work. He (and others) did the proverbial heavy lifting for multiple items in the artwork. He’s not claiming any ownership of the IP, but saying that someone else used his (and at least one other’s) free labor for a payday.

2 minutes ago, Nytwyng said:

How so? The “complainer” is taking exception not to the subject matter of the images, but to the final results of his labor being passed off as the final result of someone else’s work. He (and others) did the proverbial heavy lifting for multiple items in the artwork. He’s not claiming any ownership of the IP, but saying that someone else used his (and at least one other’s) free labor for a payday.

I don't see why the money changes anything here. The fan artist was using other people's labor to build their own reputation, too.

4 minutes ago, Stan Fresh said:

I don't see why the money changes anything here. The fan artist was using other people's labor to build their own reputation, too.

The difference is they based their own labor off of someone else's rather than using someone else's labor. Further, they lay no claim to that other's labor.

1 minute ago, P-47 Thunderbolt said:

The difference is they based their own labor off of someone else's rather than using someone else's labor. Further, they lay no claim to that other's labor.

I don't think the distinction is that clear-cut here. Recreating someone else's vehicle model is using the designer's labor of, well, designing it just as much as the freelancer is using the fan artist's work. The fan artist isn't designing their own vehicle, they're replicating an existing model.

1 minute ago, Stan Fresh said:

I don't see why the money changes anything here. The fan artist was using other people's labor to build their own reputation, too.

I respectfully disagree. The fan artist(s) used existing work as inspiration to build his (their) own artwork from the ground up. The freelancer took that completed work, inserted it into another, and claimed the final result was all his own. The paycheck is just salt in the wound; the fan artists’ work was good enough for “official” publication, but someone else got the credit and the money.

Allow me to illustrate (no pun intended) this way: Let’s say that I’m part of a group that writes Batman fan fiction. A new Batman comic comes out, and in that issue, a page is lifted word-for-word from one of my stories, and another is a direct lift from someone else’s. We don’t claim any ownership of the Batman property, but someone has still taken our work, grafted it into another work, and passed it off as their own.

I don't think one can accurately say it was build from the ground up when its a copy of someone else's design work.

And the point about the ownership: you *are* disrespecting the sole ownership by publishing your own efforts. Saying you don't claim ownership but using someone else's designs and characters and story elements and publishing them with your name or internet handle on there? That's a fig leaf.

Doing a bit of looking during lunch, here's Fractal Sponge's renders of the juggernaut:

http://fractalsponge.net/?p=134

With all those close up renders and alternate angles on the vehicle, could easily slot this under educational. So yeah, this is fair use.

12 minutes ago, Stan Fresh said:

I don't think one can accurately say it was build from the ground up when its a copy of someone else's design work.

Did any part of that 3D model exist before the fan artist started working on it? If not, then that specific work was indeed built from the ground up, in the same way that an artist painting a still life of, say, an apple on a plate created that work from the ground up, even if they didn’t grow the tree and pick the apple to put on a plate that they molded and fired themselves.

16 minutes ago, Stan Fresh said:

And the point about the ownership: you *are* disrespecting the sole ownership by publishing your own efforts. Saying you don't claim ownership but using someone else's designs and characters and story elements and publishing them with your name or internet handle on there? That's a fig leaf.

Again, I respectfully disagree. IP owners with a history of allowing fan-produced derivative works, as long as those works are not made for sale or damaging to the image of the IP would appear to disagree, as well. In this case, they’re aware of the work of at least one of the fan artists, and allow him to continue.

2 minutes ago, Nytwyng said:

Did any part of that 3D model exist before the fan artist started working on it?

Yes, the design.

2 minutes ago, Nytwyng said:

Again, I respectfully disagree. IP owners with a history of allowing fan-produced derivative works, as long as those works are not made for sale or damaging to the image of the IP would appear to disagree, as well. In this case, they’re aware of the work of at least one of the fan artists, and allow him to continue.

I think you're mixing two things here. Allowing fans to cross a boundary doesn't mean that fans aren't crossing that boundary.

Never mind. I'm out.

1 minute ago, Desslok said:

Trademark, not copyright. Two different things.

Irrelevant. Not what we're talking about there.

3 hours ago, DanteRotterdam said:

I am not doing this.

As someone who has been dealing with fair use laws and copyright claims for three years for my movie review channel, I'm not really in the mood to be lectured at by someone who knows ****all about fair use, so looks like I'll be joining you on the veranda.

17 minutes ago, Stan Fresh said:

Yes, the design.

Well, thanks for removing the rest of the context there. This is clearly not a good faith conversation.

Hey, @Desslok and @DanteRotterdam save me a seat out there.

Only if you bring the beer/consumables! Last one to the party and all that. . . .

I don’t drink, so no beer. But I’ve got some BBQ brisket left in the fridge, and I might even be convinced to share some of my stash of Barq’s Red Creme Soda that I’ve been hoarding since i brought it home from a trip back in November.

SOLD! You can come!

Lurking the thread, but...

You had me at Barqs Red Creme Soda.

Do they still make it in Diet?