lol… no no its fine… I’m fine… I didn’t mean to imply that I felt like I was ganged up on… it was a good discussion.
Feedback is always welcomed!
But when I post about my next project, I’m only making it for me or for free… I’ll even share the files. And since we’re on the topic, it is in fact another Disney related item… as in Star Wars… as in “I see you have constructed a new lightsaber.”
Even when copyright doesn’t apply, trademark can get you. Anything you use in a business (e.g. sell or have on business premises) that’s enough like a trademarked thing/character for people to think in that direction will be “confusingly similar” or suchlike. Or at least similar enough to get you a letter…
This could be construed as Glowforge giving people legal advice, which is a terrible idea.
(Note: the above should not be construed as me giving legal advice regarding giving legal advice)
Disclaimer already at the top of the Matrix - it’s purely customer driven.
They’re on shakier legal grounds with Star Wars because the fan art, fan fiction, etc… around the SciFi and Fantasy community (go common law.) Also, best not to stir up the anger of the hardcore geek crowd that is more likely to be outraged by a questionable IP prosecution of Luke Skywalker than a real life atrocity. All that said, you still can’t use Star Wars or any other SciFi/Fantasy property for a transactional profit without risking lawyers.
This is actually really complicated (uh, shocking, I know). If you take a photograph of something, you do own the rights to the image. Probably. Usually. Same is true of digital files actually. This trips up a lot of people with things that are in the public domain. Lets say theres a book with illustrations that have an expired copyright - theyre public domain pictures. But you don’t have the book, so you Google the images and just use the best resolution one. Except the google images - the photographs, scans, whatever of the book illustrations - might still be copyrighted. This is why Dover press has a copyright claim printed on all their books. All of the art work, designs, and advertising they publish are in public domain, but they went to the trouble to find and scan goodish quality versions. And their specific versions are their property.
You can take a photo of a copyrighted sign, for example, and sell it. But that can be messy too. There have been a couple court cases about it and the gist seems to be that your photo must be transformative - frame the sign in an interesting way or perspective, have a point of view, etc. Theres actually a court case right now of an artist who took people’s Instagram photos and exhibited them, unchanged, with his comments below them. The people he stole from are claiming its not transformative. He is claiming it is. It will be interesting to see the outcome.
Well, I mean as interesting as copyright court cases ever are. If anyone else happens to find IP interesting, the Disney vs adult parody-ish comic is an interesting read. The TLDR version is the main artist really wanted Disney to sue him, Disney did, Disney won, guy refused to comply, Disney basically ended up dropping everything if he would pretty please just stop drawing their characters doing adult things.
I’ve heard about this fellow. In addition to the current IG case (which just seems super weird) he won an earlier case in which he used another artist’s photography. IIRC, in that instance he used unchanged photos from a photographer’s book and managed to win the case based on “transformative” work.
Yeah, I dont really get it. He has been “rephotographing” photos since, like, the 70s. He was sued by that guy (from whom he took a bunch of stuff), and the other guy actually won, but then it was overturned on appeal.
Honestly, I wonder if part of the reason he gets away with it is because he has been doing it, largely uncontested, since the 70s or early 80s. His most famous series is advertisements that he removed the text from. It’s a weird thing.
Given the notion that truly original, creative art must be somehow be transgressive of some norm, the artist’s life is an extension of his art. Makes sense, even though a bit of a pain.
So at the event today I went around and talked to other vendors doing similar things as me… One lady has been doing this for 5 years and using Disney content/characters and has never hard from disney. But interestingly did receive a cease and desist from Harley Davidson.
There was also an ice cream food truck vendor there too that actually used goofy on his logo! Changed the colors a bit but definitely still goofy.
Interesting. I’ve heard Harley Davidson doesn’t mess around at all and, if they find you, they will send a letter and follow through. Who knows, it might be a matter of numbers with Disney being copied by hundreds of thousand of people around the world and Harley not as much. Getting a letter from wither one would make me pucker lol
I discovered that Tatooine and several other places in the Star Wars universe are actual places in Tunisia, some of which were used as locations in the movie. I made some landscapes of those places that I had to remove the Star Wars reference from the name but not the fact that they named the moon after the location.
Would it be appropriate to ask the OP if they would mind if the title of this thread was changed to include the copyright discussion?
It would be appropriate though adding an extra tag shouldn’t be any trouble.
I wish people would keep their intellectual property theft to themselves or that glowforge would delete these threads. Leaving them up just shows how little they care about others rights. I hope this isn’t true…but the proof is that these posts remain.
Glowforge doesn’t monitor all of the threads - it’s a customer controlled forum.
(They only keep an eye on the topics in the Problems and Support section.)
If you see something you want taken down, flag it. Then they will review it.
Until then, they probably don’t see it. 
The trouble is – you could still be sued for infringement and under this you might win, but the bottom line is that they have a phalanx of lawyers on payroll to address this sort of thing – so I’m not sure you would want to spend the money to fight it. Best to create your own characters, art work, etc. and then it is all yours…
I’ve emailed them about some threads…
And they seem perfectly capable of monitoring for profanity so **** it seems like monitoring for theft is at least as important. 
