Mountainhawk I have more spiderman bootskins than Al does and I'm sure if there was a bigger offender of fan art use, it would be me and not Alperium. This site allows for the use of fan art and if site moderators felt that these items should be removed, they have the ability to remove them and I wouldn't object. I submitted a Captain America wb skin last month, it's considered fan art - if it wasn't, it would have been rejected and no one would be allowed to download it. Fan Art takes into account fair use of said images as long as said far art isn't being published for the purpose of making a profit and the last time I checked, all of the skins on this site aside from the master/premium skins are free - we don't profit from any of the skins we've uploaded to the site. It's the same thing if someone freehand sketches a copyrighted image - the copyright still exists and the sketch would be considered a derivative work without permission from the copyright holder - do you think Sony or Marvel is going to chase after & sue everyone who draws an image of Spiderman even though it's technically a copyright infringement? Certainly not because it's considered fan art, even though copyright law says you need permission to actually do this. Could they if they wanted? Technically they might be able to but they're not going to. The copyright owners recognize that this type of non-profit activity is harmless to them and in fact promotes interest & awareness in said characters and probably gets more people purchasing the copyrighted material/imagery that is for sale legally which improves their bottom line. Yes I myself along with many others have submitted bootskins/logons/other skins using copyrighted material (images) without getting explicit permission from Sony/Marvel/DC (Microsoft, etc.) but fan art is OK because the owners of the copyrights say that it's OK; otherwise everyone who's ever scribbled a picture of a superhero, posted a pic on a website, printed a picture from a website (superman, spiderman, etc.) is guilty of this infringement.
Where you get into problems is when you start taking these images and publish them large scale and sell them at a profit (or attempt to make a profit: you may be a lousy business man and not make a cent but if it was your intention to make money doing this, they can still get you for this) - this is the line of work of the copyright owner at which point when you are discovered you will be told in no uncertain terms to stop what you are doing and if you don't they'll sue your but in court & win.
The internet makes this problem even more complicated because you're making use of a medium that can technically reach every corner of the globe.
However in the case of my 16 color bootskins and 256 color logons of which I charge a grand total of nothing, I would say this falls into the category of fair use. I don't make any profit from this, the only thing I gain is the satisfaction of making a bootskin that looks decent in 16 shades of it's glory or a logon that greets me when I bootup my pc or the picture of a comic book superhero when I hit my start button.
I'm nearing the end of my verbose post which I'll wrap up this way....
If you don't like it that I or anyone else on this site uses a comic book superhero as the subject of our skin that we upload to this site, there is a simple method of dealing with this problem:
1. don't download the skin the we've uploaded to the site
2. have the site reject all skins (new & existing) that include fan art in all of it's forms
3. also have the site reject skins that contain copyrights/trademarks in the form of names as well, I'm guilty of using the word "vista" alot, a few xp's every now & then as well and heck I've used that vista globe logo & text alot, better turf all of those skins as well - don't worry about getting Marvel or Sony mad, I would be afraid to get Microsoft angry: those guys have alot of money
Mountainhawk my only request to you would be to stop busting Al's or anybody else's chops over fan art and how we shouldn't use it, I'm a fan and I make use of said art in my skins and never request a cent for anything I've uploaded. If I were to ever (fat chance I'm sure) make a dollar doing this work I would want it to be on the merit of my own work and not someone elses so we can be crystal clear on that issue. When I'm asked by the site moderators to stop submitting work that makes use of fan art I shall do so.
... Maybe I'll start working on linux themed/style skins... wonder if I would offend anyone with those, maybe I should speak with Linus Torvalds first though.
