It seems the topic strayed into the weird maze that is US intellectual property law. I had a weird experience with this some years back…
Without naming names, I was on a message board/ forum much like this one in basic form and function, but devoted to a fiction, authors, books, book series, etc.
As a price of fan art, someone posted a really elaborate and quality made replica they had crafted of a specific item in a book series. Turned out the author was a member of the forum, and was flattered and pleased that someone had gone to so much effort based on his writing.
Then he found out that it was actually a commission piece for a paying customer, and had to send cease and decist notice, and get his lawyers involved.
I’m the flame war that followed, it came out that in the US, if you become aware of an infringement of your rights to intellectual property, and you don’t immediately take steps to enforce and defend your rights, there is a body of settled case law that successfully argues that you are instead choosing to surrender those rights to public domain.
While this is not always the case, and it is, of course, more complicated than that, once I learned that an author can lose the right to make any further money off of licensing replicas from his works if he doesn’t put a stop to the sale of unauthorized replicas, it made me scratch my head over the Napster case. I had originally thought of the Napster suit as being just unadulterated greed on the part of the artist, directed against Napster as a company, but to the plain detriment of the fan base rit large. After learning of the strange ways IP law handles some of this stuff, though, I have had cause to re-examine whether I might have been just a bit too harsh, jaded, and self-absorbed in my judgements of that case.
