Not crediting the work that artists feel is theirs is NOT copyright infringement.
Copyright infringement is when a piece of work is taken VERBATIM and passed off as one’s own for PROFIT without request or attribution.
FAN ART is art made by fans of a previous media request. In our case Lucasfilm, a company commissions work by artists that it will pay them to produce works for their use with a contract. The works are then released, most likely a movie, TV show, or novel (games too), and then FANS, who are artists, use Disney Lucasfilm trademarked items to create derivatives of work.
Since the items are trademarked to Disney Lucasfilm, they are the only ones who can assume any “copyright” or “infringement,” and they do, sometimes.
Fans who use these trademarked items cannot assume a trademark or copyright on their derivative works for any major remuneration. Sorry. That’s how it is.
Some of that is changing how it works online.
The best thing fan artists can do is:
WATERMARK the art.
Please dO NOT POST it online, ever.
REQUEST attribution with no snarkiness
Or you can allow people to share your art. You can also put code in the electronics that lead to your online store. Unsure how to do that.
But all of these take a business plan.
This cannot be about the emotional discharging of morals. This is about business. We are about business and what hate-filled rage attack post rants do is HARM business owners. There is ZERO emotion here. Just professional logic in business.
If you require a lawyer’s services to protect your art, please, by all means, get one.
Other than that, aggressive behavior is meted out by a block. That works for us, well. If we encounter hate-filled anon rage posts, we block, refuse to answer, and kick the few out of the 300 million blogs on Tumblr.
We will aim to attribute as much as we can. When we do not know, we will put it out there because a Google search, which is a different company than Tumblr, is not as accurate as you’d think. Still, reporting and killing blogs for an erroneous assumption on YOUR PART will make our lawyers SUE you for VIOLATION OF OUR FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION and a just cause to do legal-tendered business.
Here, buy something: shopDisney