Intellectual Property and the Paraphernalia It Comes With
The problem arises when unscrupulous businesses try and make money off another person’s intellectual property by illegally creating merchandise with it. This is not something that would affect DC or Marvel – after all, their revenues from their official merchandise and movie deals, as well as their publishing division dwarf the money made by a local vendor making a Spiderman t-shirt by countless billions. However, independent creators who do not have the privilege of being backed by a publishing giant are harmed by this. As comic artist Sebastien Millon told StripTease last month, intellectual theft is something that concerns him. “Sometimes an individual will use an image I’ve created and try to sell prints or tshirts with it,” he said. “It’s annoying, but that worries me much less than if a large company like Urban Outfitters or Target ripped off my designs, with no credit or financial compensation to the original artist. So it is large scale theft I’d be more worried about.”
The problem, then is the age old one of multinational behemoths dumping on the individual. Artist and illustrator Gemma Correll’s work has been infamously ripped off by UO, The Gap and Junk Food, although the first eventually came around to offer clothing with her name on the credits which presumably means that they chose to take the legal route. “It’s incredibly frustrating,” she wrote on her blog a couple of years ago. “I feel like I’m at the bottom of a design-foodchain (along with all the other illustrators and artists that this has happened to) when we’re the ones thinking of the ideas, only for the bigger companies to steal them and make their own crappy versions.”
It’s paradoxical, really. While publishing houses try and retain stringent control over their IP, independent creators have their work copied and made profits off by the retail equivalent of those publishers. How could all this come to a peaceable and profitable resolution for all parties, I wonder. In the meantime, DC fights over (and wins) rights to Superboy, Disney acquires Marvel in a financial coup, and the war in the realm of IP rages on.