Speaking of that gifting time of the year, we’ve just partnered with TeePublic to offer the first ever Comics Beat TeePublic Store. TeePublic is a site that offers shirts designed by independent artists—there are hundreds of designs available, smashing up all your favorite pop culture icons and slogan, but The Beat staff has specially curated a store just for our readers. It is hard to choose!
AND there’s a $14 sales on all shirts until tomorrow—shirts are normally $20 so it’s a good deal! And we’ll soon have a special Beat t-shirt up in our store as well.
So what are you waiting for? Support independent artists, support the Beat and get a snappy t-shirt to wear to your next comic-con.
Are these t-shirts officially licensed by the copyright holders?
TeePublic’s copyright policy can be found here.
So there copyright policy is “We’ll do whatever we want until we get sued?
That’s shitty. As someone who’s posted about numerous fights for creators rights, getting into bed with these pop culture Tshirt sites is really low.
Yeah, I don’t see how a legitimate parody arguement could be made for more than a handful of those shirts (if you put Flash and Roadrunner and Sonic and some other fast character (the Incredibles kid?) on a shirt, is that a parody of all than thus fair game, or is it just four separate copyright violations?). On the other hand, there are a lot of companies doing those, and the major IP holders seem to have turned a blind eye to it, so I guess that’s their business.
I know that Heidi is friendly with Colleen Doran (just as an example).
Would she be okay if I made A Distant Soil shirts and made money off of them until Ms. Doran went through the hassle of proving that they were unauthorized?
Okay a couple of things:
These kind of storefronts are so common now that it never crossed my mind.
That said, it doesn’t make it right. I didn’t pick these shirts (I had a Beat staff member with better tastes than me do it) and as it happens, most of them depict corporate owned, and not creator owned properties. Not that stealing from a corporation is a GOOD thing, but it is a natural distinction. There are no T-shirts ripping off Colleen Doran because her creations seem more personal than (to be honest) Star Wars. This is not a legal distinction but it is a distinction.
All of that said, I am closing this thread and revising my storefront. I did do due diligence on this site to make sure that it is not one that rips off webcartoonists and other artists. Once I had ascertained that it is a storefront and not a creator, I was satisfied as to that. But I will restrict the shirt to designs I own, and parody or non copyrighted shirts.
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