Intellectual Property – LAWYERS & LIQUOR

Furry Friday: Adoptables, How The F*** Do They Work?

Welcome to yet another Furry Friday here on Lawyers & Liquor, where the multicolored menagerie turns the Boozy Barrister into a mad mustelid for one day out of the month in order to discuss a legal issue related to the fandom full of giant critters. So buckle up the harnesses, shine up the tags on your leashes, and sit down with a dog bowl full of coffee and stay as we dig into the intellectual property particulars behind one of the finest traditions of furry art: the adoptable character.

And how, at the end of the day, unless certain precautions are being taken by both the artist and the purchaser, the end product is essentially nothing that most people would think it is.

I’m the Boozy Badger, and this is Lawyers & Liquor’s “Furry Friday – Adoptables, How The Fuck Do They Work?”

InkedFur’s Furry Friday: Hewwo Copywighted Wowks! Who Owns Your Commission, Part 2

Hello my fuzzy little horde of anthropomorphic intellectual property infringements! It’s time once again for another Inkedfur.com Furry Friday here on Lawyers & Liquor, where I pop open the gates and let the technicolor zoo roam the streets with wild abandon. This time, in a continuation from our discussion of copyright and your totally original and not at all Disney derivative original character, we’re going to go totally vore and get into the meat of the matter. That’s right, this time we’re going to discuss who, in all actuality, owns that commission you just paid someone to draw of a giraffe named Gerald seductively eating an ice pop or something.

Look, I don’t know what you fuzzy little assholes pay people to draw. That’s between you and whatever god you’re currently making cry.

So last time we covered a lot of the basic of what a copyright is, how you register one, etc. etc. etc. You know, all that advice that you guys are totally not going to listen to because, goddammit, you definitely have better things to do with your time and money then protect your art and fixed tangible ideas. This time we’re going to talk about something a lot more personal: what if the only fucking reason the art exists at all is you paid your hard-earned money to get someone to draw it for you?

Well. That’s a horse of a different art style, now isn’t it?

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InkedFur’s Furry Friday: Hewwo Copywighted Wowks! – Who owns your commission, Part 1

Hey everyone, it’s time for an early InkedFur’s Furry Friday, due to the fact that last month I was a crippled mess of sobbing pain when it was time to actually get this thing up. So this month, as promised last month, we’re going to look at something everyone keeps asking about as they wag their tails expectantly and keep demanding I take their side in some dispute with an artist. Namely, we’re going to look at the concept of copyright when it comes down to who owns what in a commissioning relationship in two separate Furry Friday posts, the first of which we’ll talk about today!

And allow me to be blunt when I tell you some of you are going to want to walk into the vet’s office to have yourselves put to sleep when I inform you of the law surrounding this shit. Namely, the assumption that most people have regarding the ownership of anything related to their fursona or any other fluffy character they may create. But to discuss THIS, we first need to talk about a few basics of copyright so…you know…we fucking know what we’re talking about here.

But first, a disclaimer!

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Guest Post: Most People Are Fuzzy on IP – An Intellectual Property Primer

[BOOZY’S NOTE: There is a certain class of readers out there for my site that seem to, well, be really interested in the concepts that underlie intellectual property. These readers also tend to be creative type folks who may or may note make their living doing stuff like drawing characters and making costumes and crap. And then there are the readers that are the customers for those types, and they have a lot of questions. Which I don’t answer. Because, by and large, I’m not an intellectual property attorney and have only a general working knowledge of intellectual property.

You know who is an intellectual property attorney, though? Who has an in-depth knowledge of that area and can tell you what the general four classes of intellectual property are, and then give you an idea of what each means, so that people can stop saying things like “I’m gonna patent my drawing?” Marc Whipple, also known on Twitter as @legalinspire .

And, because I somewhat know Marc, I’ve shanghaied him into writing a guest post for all those folks who keep sending me 2 A.M. direct messages and emails about what an intellectual property term means, and he graciously agreed. So, because he’s smarter than me, I’ll shut up now and let him tell you guys all about the classes of intellectual property.]

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