Usagi Yojimbo T-shirt on TeeFury

[smoochy]

Take a quick look at the tshirt for today (Tuesday 10/16) on http://www.teefury.com.

[Steve Hubbell]

And while you are checking out the t-shirt, keep in mind that the company Teefury never requested permission to use Stan Sakai's trademarked character or bothered to offer to pay any compensation for that use. Teefury is nothing but a thief of other people's intellectial property.

read more about them here:

http://www.comicsbulletin.com/news/4913 ... rchandise/

(and Smoochy has been treated like any other spammer, except I left the post up)

[coolray85]

thats sad...I hAVE one teefury shirt and it is one of my favourite shirts in the world...it has jim lawsons pannel of leonardo from tmnt vol 4 issue #1 on it and the character is full of words...words that have to do with the turtles world..like kevin eastman..pizza...peter laird...katana...and such;)
I LOVE that short to death;)and I even send jim the shirt design and he said he was happy that this drwaing, these turtles maintain out there;)...

[Mayhem]

Out of interest, as a philosophical question Steve, how do you see Tee Fury selling a shirt based upon a design someone drew for money, compared to any artist selling a commission piece using someone else's IP? I asked David Petersen to draw Usagi for me, and paid him for the commission. So David should pay some of that money to Stan? I'm curious to hear your viewpoint...

[fiawol]

People are forgiving of them when the artists who design the shirts steal the intellectual property of a big corporation, but they tend to forget that such "known" characters as Hellboy or Usagi Yojimbo are owned by individuals, not some big faceless company. It would be somewhat different if the rights holder was intentionally not allowing licensed items to be made (such as Calvin and Hobbes, with is entirely a bootleg industry), but existing shirt companies have paid Stan for years for the right to print shirts featuring his character, so anything Teefury sells is taking sales away from authorized versions (including the official Dojo shirt!). I used to buy from teefury, but more recently my money has been going towards places like shirt.woot or designsbyhumans, which print more artist-centric shirts instead of character centric ones. If you really want a Usagi shirt, consider an official Dojo one!
http://usagiyojimbo.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2162

Dave M.

[fiawol]

Out of interest, as a philosophical question Steve, how do you see Tee Fury selling a shirt based upon a design someone drew for money, compared to any artist selling a commission piece using someone else's IP? I asked David Petersen to draw Usagi for me, and paid him for the commission. So David should pay some of that money to Stan? I'm curious to hear your viewpoint...

We're back to the "faceless corporation" viewpoint. You can't be "friends" with Marvel, so you don't feel guilty about using their characters (technically and legally it is trademark infringement though), but indy comics creators (in particular people like David Peterson and Stan Sakai) DO know each other and are friends (or at least friendly) with each other. Dave will probably give Stan a copy of his newest Mouse Guard book the next time they see each other (and Stan return the favor with a copy of his book) not because it's payment for using his character in a commission, but because they want to give a gift to a friend. It's the moral equivalent of borrowing your neighbor's hedge trimmer to cut your own hedge: Stan's hedge isn't any different because Dave used Stan's trimmer (character), and maybe next time Stan will be asked to draw a Mouse Guard character, so he can borrow Dave's leaf blower instead!
As long as you're not printing thousands of t-shirts with that art, I don't think many (if any) artists would mind another artist drawing their character. Yes, if push came to shove it WOULD be trademark infringement, but who wants to sue over a cheap convention sketch? Suing over $20,000 worth of shirts? That's an ENTIRELY different matter!

Dave M.

[bwbollom]

Yeah, I kind of see it as being ok if its a one-off thing (like an original art commission) but not so much if its a mass produced item. If someone wanted to 'borrow' Usagi Yojimbo for a convention sketch it's probably not a problem (but that's definitely Stan's call, obviously not mine). If that same person decided to 'borrow' UY for a 10,000 print poster of the same sketch, it might likely become an issue.

I'm sort of hot and cold on Tee Fury. Some of their shirts I could see as fitting into the 'parody' category and might not technically be a problem. But others, like the Hellboy one, are pretty much just straight takes on someone's character used for profit. That doesn't seem right.

But the UY Tee Fury shirt just seems uninteresting to me. I've seen a lot of awesome takes on UY from various artists' convention sketches...this just feels like its trying to be funny but falls very flat for me.

[Steve Hubbell]

Out of interest, as a philosophical question Steve, how do you see Tee Fury selling a shirt based upon a design someone drew for money, compared to any artist selling a commission piece using someone else's IP? I asked David Petersen to draw Usagi for me, and paid him for the commission. So David should pay some of that money to Stan? I'm curious to hear your viewpoint...

If David sold a drawing he did of Usagi Yojimbo that he "knew" was going to be used commercially, he would make sure Stan was in full agreement of the project ahead of time and that arrangements had been made for compensation.

It is a matter of both ethics and respect.

[Otter]

See.. now I bought that shirt. I thought it was cute. I love theefury's mashups of my favourite characters and things that would never see print otherwise. I don't think it's taking money from Stan... but I'd love to hear his thoughts.

[Gallennon]

Well as a fan to Usagi/ Stan Sakai and other indie comics and their respective writers, could there be more 3XL shirt available when stuff is released. I always find official stuff I love, but it usually cost too much and is XL or some odd interpretation of 2XL, so I always go to 3XL, which is hard to find.
At the same time, I did not mean to start a copyrights war post, I did not know about these guys and I just thought it was a neat shirt, since I usually cannot score the official stuff when it comes out in limited quantities. Hell I am still going on about how I got lucky and got one the Usagi statues from the series one collection at Nekocon three years ago. I seriously thought it was ok to get the shirt because it was a parody and not an actual cut and pasted image of Stan's work. Now I feel terrible.