hellkitty wrote:Here's the dumb thing, though: I can see their beef against direct competition: toys. I can't see their beef against fan art or fan crafts, because they're actually not LOSING any money. If they're not selling a competitive product, they are losing NOTHING.
allow me to play "unicron's lawyer" for a second...
But I'm pretty sure Hasbro can in some way claim to be losing money off Joe Bloggs drawing a nice picture of Starscream and selling it for $5. Hasbro sell a license to IDW to create comic books, which are essentially paper with pictures of transformers on them. I'd suspect, although haven't actually seen any lately, that IDW or a 3rd party have a license to create art prints and posters and stuff featuring the art from those comics, and I'm fairly certain there must be some company somewhere getting paid to produce posters featuring the movie renders of Prime and Bumblebee, that are clogging up space in stores across the land as we speak.
This sort of corporate BS isn't new. The Mouse recently hit an old man with a lawsuit because he was selling Ghost Rider prints. The man was Gary Friedrich who cannot be legally named as the creator of Ghost Rider, because Herr Disney got a court order to stop such identification being made. That's in an industry that publishes the names of the creators of the work (which is done on a work for hire contract, same as IDW's comics, or Takara's toy engineering) on the covers of the products. You think Hasbro, who very rarely identify or acknowledge their designers, are going to go any easier on people?