Raw LLM Responses

Is it legal to sell fan art? Yes…and no. Nuance matters. It is not legal to either sell reproductions of IP and creative works of others or give a license to others to do so. Which basically means you can’t make and sell prints nor can you upload the work to a print-on-demand site because doing that always entails you giving the POD site a license to reproduce your uploaded work. Things are different though for TRADITIONAL, physical medium original pieces. It is 100% legal to both make and sell basically any oil painting (or acrylic painting, or watercolor, or pencil sketch) of anything in existence. This even includes making “master copies” of other people’s original paintings. And this makes sense if you think about it. Let’s say you are a very famous (and very old) and highly valued oil painting portrait painter. Your portraits typically sell for $9000 to $20,000. One day you decide to paint a portrait of Superman because he was your favorite superhero as a kid and you never painted him and at your age…time is running out to do so. So you paint it in oil on canvass and hang it in your home. Five years later you die and you son inherits it. He puts it up for auction and it sells for $50,000. Was this illegal? Obviously not. You had the legal right to paint it in oil and he now has legal ownership of it. Is he not allowed to sell this physical item because Superman’s image is on it? Wouldn’t that mean he didn’t really “own” it? Because true ownership implies the ability to sell it. Now you see the problem. The law says he CAN own it…fully. Which means he can sell it. For $50,000. But wait…what about YOU? You painted it. So your son could sell it but you can’t? Are we suggesting that anyone in the world…EXCEPT YOU…can own and sell it? You’re the only one who can’t? Wouldn’t that be silly? Yes it would. And that is why original traditionally created works of “fine art” are treated in a special way by the law. You can make as many as you want. And you can sell the originals. But you can’t take pictures of them and put the images on t-shirts, back packs, and prints. And it gets even weirder, because…. Let’s say a “digital artist” created a digital painting of Spider-Man and posted it to Artstation. This would be legal. What would NOT be legal is if he tried to make a “reproduction” of that digital piece (e.g. a “print”) and sell it. BUT…it 100% WOULD be legal for a traditional oil painter to pull up the piece on art station, set up his paint and canvass, and then paint a master copy. And because it was an “original” work…he could then sell it. So the guy who made it digitally has nothing he can legally sell…but the oil painter can paint a copy of the digital work..and CAN legally sell it!!! Weird huh? And it makes you want to switch from digital to traditional mediums a bit, no? In conclusion… it is 100% legal to make original artworks in traditional physical mediums and sell them for a profit. But since most people at convention “artist alley” spaces are not doing that but are in fact selling reproductions…most artist alley artists are not covered by the “original works” legal concept and are thus selling illegal reproductions and are getting away with it. [Think I am wrong? Copy everything I just wrote…paste it into ChatGPT and add the following at the end, “I just read this in a comment on a YouTube video. Is this guy correct?” When you do…please copy and paste what old Jarvis says as a reply below. Then others can see if I’m right as well.]