In the last few years a lot of “homemade” t-shirts have been popular to sell online. Ordinary artists in their free time create their own designs, put them online at a t-shirt/hoodie/coffee mug printing website, and people can buy them.
But an awful lot of these designs use licensed characters and imagery - usually redrawn in a new style, and often placed in a humorous or otherwise unique context.
How can these kinds of images, being sold for real money, with nothing going towards the original creators of the trademarked or copyrighted properties, be allowed to exist? It seems to me there’s some line that they haven’t crossed, but it’s a vague one and I’d like to know where it lies.
If I created a T-Shirt of Pacman eating Space Invaders, or Batman vs Radioactive Man, or Sheldon Cooper in his The Flash costume, what trouble could I get into?
Parody is fair game. Note that Mad Magazine for example often has images on its cover that are obvious spoofs of trademarked things. What trouble could you get into? Well if you had a Batman image on your shirt and Warner Brothers decided to sue you, it might cost you a heck of a lot to defend yourself even if the court eventually found in your favor. And of course they might not.
And some stuff, the rights owners either don’t mind and tacitly allow, or even explicitly give permission for. George Lucas could almost certainly have axed the Robot Chicken Star Wars stuff, for instance, but as it happens he found it hilarious.
Some popular t-shirts using licensed characters have been removed from sale. I recently bought one on clearance where there was no image, just a very superficial description and a “you know which shirt I mean”.
Here’s an old article about some legal battles over Calvin and Hobbes. The comic-strip syndicate has indeed sued and won against some large-scale manufacturers of unauthorized merchandise, but the stickers one sees everywhere are generally produced by sources too small to be worth suing.
CafePress (a print-on-demand online shop that sells things like t-shirts and mugs and stuff) has “Fan Portals” that you can design for. Each “Fan Portal” has its own rules about how you can use their images, slogans, etc. and if your product doesn’t meet their specifications, it can be removed. But they at least have a mechanism set up by which independent artists can create t-shirts and such for licensed stuff like tv shows, comics, movies, etc.
I think CP worked something out with each of those entities to allow their shopkeepers to sell fan stuff. I doubt a single person operating on their own or even a small print shop would be able to work out a legal way to print shirts that used licensed material without buying a license.
I have a friend who sells prints and mugs that include recognisable characters but in his own style. He never uses logos, or names the characters, but most are quite obvious. I’ll ask him it’s ever caused him legal bother.
One thing I learned with that campaign video that contained a version of “This Land Is Your Land” is that it has to actually be parodying the copyrighted work.