Worried about copyright issues with Lovely Precious Vol 02 - Unicorn
ramisundqvist
Posts: 6
in The Commons
Hello. I made some nice renders with these figures: https://www.daz3d.com/lovely-precious-vol-02-unicorn
I have plans to use them commercially but I got worried about the copyright issues because they might look too much like My Little Pony characters. Is there any reason to worry or can I just use my rendered pics in commercial use without any problems with My Little Pony trademark?
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This is a completley Unique set of figures made by one of Daz 3d's talented PAs about 3 years ago. It has been on sale for all that time with no problems.
There are other creatures in the set in the store a Gryphon, a Dragon, a horse, a tiger, a deer etc Check her store https://www.daz3d.com/lady-littlefox
This is not something that can be sorted out in the forums
We suggest that you contact Daz directly, using Zendesk and filing a help request
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It depends how you're using them.
If they're a minor part in a scene, then that's probably not a problem. If they're the focus of the scene and you're using them to market a product (say, as a book cover), then you may be in trouble; although it'll depend on the jurisdiction, whether it's actually an infringement, Hasbro has enough money that even if it were ultimately decided in your favour, they can just throw lawyers at you until you can't afford to fight the case.
Unfortunately, the law often doesn't protect who's right, but who can afford to fight the case for longest. So it's really a matter of whether Hasbro thinks it's an infringement.
It would be better to contact Daz themselves please. The forum and forum members may have the knowledge, but are not experts.
I don't think Daz themselves will be able to provide concrete assurance. Because Hasbro have far more legal resources than any artist, if they want to fight, they can win by sheer bullying. Most likely it'd just start with a Cease and Desist letter (as those are much cheaper than a court case), which is strictly non-binding, but unless you can afford to fight it by that point you're already in an armlock.
(So, no, you probably won't end up sued into oblivion as long as you're prepared to capitulate when an angry letter arrives, but the sad truth is that if an angry letter arrives, you probably won't be able to fight it even if you're in the right. Whether it's a good idea to start using the models depends on whether you want to take the risk of having to quit halfway through).
Isn't it depressing, though. I mean, "them" having "monopoly" on theme, because they "did it first".
I would make the query to DAZ store's Qa as suggested. I'm sure that they thoroughly vetted and reviewed this item before offering for sale.
I would also make sure to refer copyright holders with questions to the store.
I'm not sure how sarcastic that's supposed to be, but frankly, "stylised cartoon ponies" isn't actually that original an idea.
If we see a stylised human with big eyes and smoothed facial features, we don't immediately assume that it's infringing on Disney's look. No-one is asking "If I use 'The Girl', am I going to get sued?"... but for some reason, everyone has willingly bought into the idea that doing something similar with horses is immediately My Little Pony.
And with copyright, if something is close enough that you're wondering if you're going to get sued, there's a good chance the person who might sue you is thinking the same way - and if it's a big company, they can afford to take the chance of throwing a lawsuit at it.
I don't tend to use sarcasm on forums. Consider my reply as sad thought about "i did it first so it's mine" mindset some corporations might do.
The issue is that these are more than stylized cartoon ponies. They are stylized cartoon ponies clearly based on the My Liitle Pony ip. That ip includes trademarks on each pony and its distinctive likeness.
Copyright really isn't the issue unless the op intended to actually offer the renders with the MLP names or something. But trademarks are an entirely seperate matter. Those characters walk all over the MLP trademarks and if anyone uses them in a commercial render they are opening themselves up to a lawsuit. Keep in mind these suits, if it went all the way to judgement, are decided by either 6 jurors or a single judge. Would anyone really want to risk losing the kind of money Hasbro would seek for trademark infringement on the off chance you could get 4 jurors who think the images aren't infringing?
Honestly, i never feelt comfortable using "as is"
better to make it your own with a lil tweaking and kitbashing,
I had it described to me once by a copyright/ip lawyer as follows:
"Are you profiting upon how closely your product/image/etc resembles someone else's work?" If yes, then it is a violation because without that work existing, your work would not be sellable.
"Is your work in someway transformitive in nature such that it is creating an entirely new property?" If yes, then you may have grounds for 'parody' but that is shaky.
I had a pretty good case for it a very very long time ago with a series of comic characters I drew that depicted the characters of a tv show as children. The company that owned them sent me a cease and desist and I went to a lawyer. The lawyer told me that while I had grounds for parody, that grounds of defense meant exactly zip when the company that would take legal action had an endless bankroll and could basically bleed me into bankruptcy with endless appeals... essentially bullying me into loosing. My rights to parody didn't honestly matter all that much if I couldn't afford to defend them.
So what you need to ask yourself are those two big questions in what you intend to do with Precious and if it is transformative enough or different enough to support a counter suit for legal costs should someone get annoyed.
For my own part, the essense of the Precious line is that it is made around a generic big eyed toon deer with parts that you can mix and match to make your own creatures. Therefore, Unicorn is as natural as an addition as a Tiger or a Dragon. And the coloring, etc. was standard unicorn, dragon, with appropriate coloring and parts.It didn't derive profit from how close it looked to a pony. It derived profit from transforming the original into many options.
Some of the pieces can be put together with the right colors and addition of stickers to create something like a My Little Pony I'm sure, but just like my Star character could be mixed with the Girl and a red wig to make a Jessica Rabbit knock off. But in no way did I advertise this capability as a selling point for the character, so I am not deriving profit from how similar it is to an Intellectual Property (IP).
The danger of using the pieces as pertains to copyright, is not the figures themselves, but how you choose to use them. If your intended use is to make little fun colored horses or even unicorns for a game, then I don't see that this would be too dangerous provided you avoided things like single colors and cutie marks and names like 'equestria' or 'canterlot' or 'twilight sparkle'.. But if your intent is to derive profit from how close you can tailor your property to look like an existing IP of Hasbro just like making a character as close as you can to Jessica Rabbit and claiming you have license to do that because you bought the products from daz that built it, that's not going to stand as a reasonable defense, nor is it going to put the burden of defense on the original product maker. That's going to put everything on you and how willing are you to face the legal battle to claim it's different enough to be allowed.
It sucks, but those are the rules of the world as it was explained to me. Hope it helps.
I don't for a second believe the actual product in itself contravenes trademarks any more than say Spore creature creator and its parts would, or owning a set of Lego bricks.
but
certainly one can create creatures in Spore that do out of the parts or structures that do out of Lego bricks.
The promo pictures on the otherhand those do fly pretty close to the Intellectual Property IMO.
but to be fair they are just an example of usage not the product itself and people do do fan art.
The issue isn't whether you would win or lose a court case over some unicorn. The issue is whether risking a lawsuit is worthwhile. The cost of defending such a suit for one week would outweigh the benefit you'd get from the product, and that's a long way from any kind of hearing on the merits.
My suggestion would be instead of single coloring the body, take a hint from nature and add blaze, stockings, spots. Change it up so that it doesn't match the pastel pallet of uniform color with a mix and match mane.. That would at the very least deviate from the standard.
Seconding the mention of changing up the colors. A big part of MLP are those bright colors and cutie marks.
Another option you might have is to change the shape a bit by mixing some of the other Precious characters in. I'm pretty sure they have morphs, and you could blend in a little bit of of the other characters to help exaggerate certain features and de-emphasize other parts, creating something that looks even less like MLP.
Part of the question to watch for is, "are they so similar than one could easily confuse them for being represntative of MLP?" If so, you may want to change them a bit more.
(Of course, I'm not a lawyer, so I can't say how helpful the above will be to differentiating them).
Strictly, no. The unicorns aren't winged, but some characters are alicorns (with both unicorn and pegasus features).
I couldn't tell you any more, but I often provide technical help for Source Filmmaker, and it has a big My Little Pony fandom, so I've picked up some of very basics simply through trying to help people with technical problems. (A lot of these people provide pretty useless descriptions of their problems that assume I'm supposed to recognise the names of the characters in the screenshot).
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In any case, I will also third the suggestion of shifting them away from solid pastel shades. That will do a lot to make them more distinct.
I quickly Google'd My Little Pony unicorn and got this image. For me, it's the eyes that make me think of MLP right away.
Looks pretty much like the horses used by the Chinese video game company I tested for but with longer tail & mane. I like yours better though really. A horse is a horse and to caricaturize any creatures usually means exagerrating traits of old age or youth, horses are no exception.
As for big companies winning against the little guy by simply out-spending them on lawyers.... I'm hoping we see reform. There has been some people trying to bring about a particular sort of tort reform called Loser Pays, which basically means that the loser pays ALL the court costs and legal expenses of BOTH sides, which pretty much would cut the legs right out from under those "We'll just outspend them on lawyers, we've got millions of dollars to throw at it." abusers of the law.
But yeah, best to make your toon pony character look as unique and different as possible. On the other hand, back when the guy who created Howard the Duck originally was preparing to bring him out, a bunch of Disney lawyers showed up wanting him to redesign his character so it looked nothing at all like Donald Duck, even though it wasn't really intended to look particularly like Donald Duck, it was just.... a general cartoon duck brought to the regular world. They wound up having a long series of discussions with how to change the appearance of his character to look less and less like Donald, with him sending pictures of the changes as these discussions went along, for them to approve whether that was changed enough. Eventually he wound up with something that he later described as looking Howard's head was a Volkswagan Beetle At that point, the Howard the Duck guy finally just said SCREW THIS!!! and went all the way back to his ORIGINAL version of what Howard the Duck was supposed to look like, and went with that in the comic... and had NO problem from them since. And that was decades ago.
I honestly wouldn't worry about it unless you're doing something controversial with the product. A prime example where companies would go after you:
Remaking the board game Monopoly and calling it Ghettopoly: Instead of hotels, they had crackhouses and such. Who didn't see that coming...
Basically, any time you duplicate the likeness of something copyrighted(Disney characters, etc.) in such a manner that detracts from the original(s), there's a possibility they're going to come after you; especially if there's a lot of money involved and/or if it casts a negative light on the original(s)(i.e. doing violent/pronographic versions for distribution). I'm surprised the creators of South Park didn't have problems with Disney for some of the episodes they did with likenesses of Mickey Mouse as a rather violent mouse.
The eys and the hair/tail are the distinctive features IMO. Just compare the hair in the asset to the MLP characters.
^South Park use the 'parody' defence - and they have the money for lawyers if need be. Depending on your jurisdiction, the winner can claim legal costs from the loser - but this may be after the fact so you may be paying legal fees initially and then claiming them back.
Your best bet would be to ask a lawyer - although contacting Daz initially would be a good move too as they have experience with this kind of thing.
As has been said, if in doubt consult a lawyer - nothing said here has any real authority. Since there have been some ToS violations, and since there's nothing really useful to be said, the thread has been locked.