#at the risk of being dogpiled by people who don't really understand what I mean

[cyberphuck]

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(tumblr cut off MOST of my tags in this, thanks Tumblr)

[weebsinstash]

I’m sorry if this is a dumb question, but I don’t understand why doing fanfic commissions is illegal? Artists (who draw I mean, not writers) do it all the time, hell, they even create fan merch and no one yells at them for going against the law or something. Why are the rules different when it comes to fanfics? I thought as long as you don’t claim the characters you write about as your own everything’s fine?

Its complicated because in essence it all comes down to many different factors,, the biggest being if you're worth the company's time to sue (for example, people doing hundreds of commissions a month are bigger liabilities than like a teenager writing about a fictional character holding your hand). Technically, creating any sort of fan merch for profit --art, fanfiction, clothing-- is illegal. Whether or not you are actually going to get in trouble or the creator would even bother sending a simple cease and a desist is debatable, but regardless, you're selling something that has someone else's intellectual property in it and that essentially constitutes as theft and plagiarism under current law. Doing the whole "i don't own these characters, all rights reserved" doesn't actually do anything to protect you, at all, and actually when you do that you're admitting you're aware that you're using a property that doesn't belong to you, which is an "admission of guilt" which could be used against you if you ever did get in trouble imo

It's not really consistent at all because like, obviously most IP owners do not have the time to track every single person on every single website down, especially obscure little bloggers, but people do still get in trouble. In fact, there have been vindictive people who report fancontent straight to the companies/creators themselves for the express purpose of getting fan creators in trouble using the whole "You're illegally selling content" debate just because they don't like their shit. Like, for example, it's a separate but similar issue, but look at what happened with kazooli getting her PayPal or patreon or whatever mass reported by people who'd never even read her shit and were just dogpiling onto performance activism over nothing and they cut off her income just because they knew they could cause a big fucking mess with no consequences to themselves

tbh making money with art commissions or fanfiction commissions is always a gamble because sure, the creator of whatever you're making fan content for isn't aware of you, but there are plenty of dickbags on the internet who could decide to cause shit for you just out of spite. And also with it being the modern era, sometimes the creators themselves or members of their team are on the same website as you. Some larger companies actually have teams and departments for hunting down stolen content (which is why everyone is immediately saying that Disney is going to be the one to shut tumblr down because it's a megamonopoly with tons of wealth and this website is COVERED in content with their IPs)

Tl;dr companies don't want you taking any money that they perceive as belonging to them, they don't want you to tarnish the image of whatever IP you're using and thus hurt the company's profits, and also, as part of basic IP/copyright law, if you do not defend your IP from copying and theft you can actually lose legal ownership of that IP. A prime example is if Nintendo didn't crack down on everyone they catch making knock off joycon controllers, they could lose the patent for the controller design altogether and that could then be stolen by competitors

Tlrdr tldr its just a bunch of money grubbing legal bullshit and while most people will never run into any trouble, the risk is still there, and if you're caught you can be fined (however this is usually relative to whatever you've been doing. Unless you made significant significant money i doubt they'll even sue you, just send a cease and desist telling you to stop or else)