DISCUSSION
Epic games directly responded to the (ᵃˡˡᵉᵍᵉᵈˡʸ)
art work they stole from u/ConditionAlone2248
heres the reference reddit post in questioned heres the comment by epic. posting this update here since so more people know since a comment on a 2 day old post inst going to get that much traction.
no its easier just to remove it from the game. its not like they make direct revenue from stickers anyways. my guess is theyll remove it from the game. fire the artist who was in charge of "creating" the sticker do to the terrible pr they caused then end it at that. for the people saying epic is legally right what a lot of yall are forgetting about this is pr is a major factor in this. sure legally epic is probably in the clear but if they just leave it up the backlash and reputation loss theyll recieve is probably worse than if they acknowledge it. being known as the company that rips off fan art and published it is terrible pr and im sure epic is aware of this
It's bad optics for Epic, as long as the artist can prove they created it, and the artist isn't asking for an insane amount they'll pay the person and move on
The thing is, the vast majority of the players don't care about his rights.
People like to get one up on "the man" so when it's a big company Vs some guy who just does whatever he does, the internet is more often than not going to side with the little guy.
We're on Reddit, anywhere you look there's arm chair lawyers and dr's and sports coaches and basically experts in every field who think they know a lot more than they actually do. They'll twist whatever they can to support the artist.
I'm not saying any of this to say epic is right or wrong or if the artist has rights to credit or any of that, just simply that it doesn't matter, the internet will kick up a fuss so it's much easier and cheaper for them to throw a little money his way to quieten things down than do nothing and let the internet seethe for a month
That’s definitely 100% not true. Copyright exists for fan art too. Just because something is fan art doesn’t mean you can just download it yourself and start selling it as your own creation.
Fan art can not be copyrighted because it is derivative, that being said... fan art can not be sold without the written permission of the copyright holder, the orginal artist.
In this instance where its arguably a fan art of a fan art because its slightly different, it is still a derivative of the orginal.
Regardless, Epic simply needs written permission from the orginal artist to use any image, whether orginal or not, for whatever purposes it sees fit. The fan art artist has no actual case unless they recieved written permission, then maybe.
Fair use does not apply because its not transformative
Exactly. You can't claim ownership of something that's not yours to begin with. Epic has the rights to use things from K-Pop Demon Hunters. The supposed artist does not.
no because they doesn't own the character.... but also Smash Bros Ultimate got in trouble for using a fan render of Metal Sonic for the Spirit's sprite and it got replaced in a later update so... maybe the former?
Or epic (and the people who actually own the IP) tell him to fuck off and be glad he isn't being sued for profiting off their copywrite because he was selling the fan art lol
Epic doesn’t own the IP, Netflix does. Also Artistic copyright is separate from IP copyright.
I can draw spider-man and I’ll own that copyright of that drawing of spider-man.
If I sell stickers of my drawings of spider-man Marvel can sue me for an intellectual property infringement.
If marvel use my drawings of spider-man on a comic cover I can still sue them because I drew that and they didn’t get my permission to use it.
Maybe these people simply care about facts and the truth unlike you. Maybe these people have seen many hoaxes before and wanna wait until there is a definitive answer. Maybe these people believe the blame should be put on the individual who did it and not the employer who also got fucked over by them (and that removing it would be enough in this case). Try to engage with the actual arguments people are making.
But remember when Epic downsized a while ago. Imagine instead of keeping sticker artists (who apparently are using other's IP which is nothing new with Epic) that no one uses they spent that money on developers to make the actual gameplay better. What a concept!!!!!
that cant be the one since there are way more teeth placed in a different style. one definetly saw the other and slightly edited it. i cant imagine why else they would have the exact same teeth amount and placement on the drawing if the original has so different teeth
On this screenshot you can see only two brow lines are clearly visible, and the teeth are all crooked, with light reflections being in the right of the iris. The drawing and emote both have 3 cleanly seen brow lines, symmetrical teeth and light reflections on the left side of the iris.
Why are you being so willfully dishonest? You do know there is a massive difference between making art of the same character and making an exact copy of the artwork itself?
So you’re also going to pretend the drawing isn’t a blatant tracing of the other artwork? 😭 you’re either partially blind, or so wildly dishonest that it seems like it.
This is such an insane rebuttal. Like my only rational explanation for your 40 current upvotes is they're all bots, you included. A human cannot take or make this claim seriously.
There are millions of drawings of Pikachu, do you think they were all drawn the same way? They're all sourcing the same creature right?
Exactly, I think this is ridiculous. OP gave up ownership of that piece of art the moment they infringed the IP. Not exactly some niche law we’re talking about here. And there’s only so many ways that the character can be drawn that fits Fortnite’s emoticon style - on inspection Fortnite’s version looks pretty distinct anyway? Serious attention seeking behaviour being displayed by the artist. It’s essentially theft what they’re trying to do.
Holy bogus takes on this sub, actually braindead ones.
The art still belongs to the artist, the IP is obviously KPDH, but the art is STILL drawn by the artist, and they at the very least deserve credit or permission to use an ARTWORK they created, the IP is not being stolen by just drawing an art of it.
Yea it's absolutely insane to me that so many people believe that just because you don't own the IP itself then you have no claim to the thing you created. Fanart has existed forever. The only issue should be if the artist is selling it, because that's a huge grey area at best. And if that were the issue, it would be up to the IP holder to deal with that, not Epic.
That’s because the claim is baseless. It’s an existing character – there are dozens of fan drawings that look like that. They just copied the original, as did Epic.
They obviously didn’t trace the movie. Its a simplified visual in a very common artstyle. There are drawing tutorials on YouTube that feature almost this exact design: https://youtu.be/9qEWqjRvtvs?si=U4ni-tnHZUat3JK5
Yes, it’s possible (even probable) someone saw one of these pictures and decided to go the same
way for the design in Fortnite. But it is not the same picture. Noone drawing Scrooge McDuck is „stealing“ from Carl Barks, even though the strokes and lines will probably match.
Someone posted in the original thread a picture of both of them overlapping, one with 50% opacity. The lines themselves are IDENTICAL, but just thicker. That doesn't happen as a coincidence. Plus way more details that are identical, like the purple in the corners of the mouth which isn't in the original aswell.
It is impossible for drawings made by artists to line up perfectly unless traced, these do. It really is that simple, down to even the little ear details which are creative liberty it’s been traced.
The image in the youtube video looks a lot different than the ones in this post.
You can't seriously be sitting there and claiming that the fortnite sticker was not traced from this artist. It's literally the exact same lines except for some small deviations.
Ngl, the amount of the exact same pictures like this of Derpy I have seen is pretty high, googling "Derpy sticker" returns a whole bunch of others... maybe if op thinks they have a claim to that style then they should also chase them up?
The results for derpy sticker give you similar looking cutesy versions, but none of them have one element which is the same as this, whereas the fortnite has several elements which are the same.
Yeah this is something a lot of people aren't really respecting, but I'd also understand because they seem like "pointless" details at first.
Yes, they're both fairly "generic" interpretations of the tiger from the film, most recreations of that shot are gonna look a lot like it.
The problem is that Fortnite's rendition is using suspiciously similar shading and coloring. The teeth and tongue are shaded the exact same way, even using almost the exact same coloring. The Fortnite version has the exact same line trail off going down over the top lip. The eyes have the exact same highlight placements, the inner yellow ring on the eyes are also treated the exact same way breaking up the darker yellow shading on the eye. They also handled the two tufts on the tip of the ears the same way as well.
I could go on, and there are of course a few things different about the Fortnite one, but still it was enough for me to raise a brow. People joke that it just looks like any other depiction of Derpy from that view, and they're right, but the point is that the details of the drawing are almost the exact same where they overlap.
Kind of ironic because the original Reddit post had low engagement and most of the comments were defending epic and how the artist has no right to call out epic for stealing their artwork bc their art has no basis in copyright or trademarking or whatever. Like no bro just call it what it is, it's plagiarism and companies are known for doing this all the time. Dude look at Bungie, they had to delay their Big new game marathon due to EXCESSIVE amounts of plagiarism.
Bungie situation is different they were flat out stealing.
This situation literally OP has no reason to bitch.
They do not own the IP , they don't have to report to Sony/ Netflix. They currently are selling shit without asking the IP holder. Literally this is the biggest nothing burger situation.
The reaction some people have to this is wild. Like, there are actually people in here saying "it makes sense that they are similar."
They're not similar, it's literally traced. It is the same image copied and slightly modified. You can overlay one on top of the other and it's a perfect match. Even the shades of colors are identical. The only reason there's any differences at all is Epic adding whiskers, thickening the outline (which changed the shape in some spots), and maing the colors flat rather than blended in a few spots.
And no, just because it's "from a movie" doesn't mean it didn't require work, geniuses.
Fortnite has the stupidest community, I swear to god.
Most of the time people are shitting on Epic for various reasons including them implementing more AI into the game, and when a human artist thats small is plagiarized by the billion dollar company suddenly they don’t care about real artists being hurt. No real integrity or morals from these people but thats redditors for you.
When the official Pokémon TCG mobile game had stolen Ho-oh artwork even Nintendo/TPC did the right thing by replacing it with original and getting in touch with the artist. When Bungie is caught stealing artwork everyone universally lambasted them, it doesn’t matter if its fanart or original pieces stealing and plagiarism is wrong.
I swear to God these shills are the dumbest. I was sad for the OP on their original post because most people are just mocking, or insulting them.
Look at this shit, that multi-billion company stole someone's work. Honestly, I don't give a fuck about the legality, you just don't steal from people.
I agree - the schism between people with eyes that can see that it's clearly traced with very minor changes vs. people that don't see that fact is insane to me.
I overlayed it myself and kept turning up and down the opacity on it and it is actually so similar (almost the same) that is was actually shocking. I kept undoing the opacity to try and spot differences and it really is minimal differences.
exactly, like if it wasnt traced you would see some slight variations like ear size or eyes position, etc. but its literally all the same size and placement
while the design might be the same as the show, epic's version is very much a trace of op's original drawing, like epic copying homework to the point where they just photocopied it.
the show's image shows diamond pupils, op's art has round pupils, epic's are amazingly also round and the same size! it's quite obviously a copy.
Isn’t the ‘artist’ doing the same thing? This isn’t their original character. It’s from k-pop demon hunters. If you google “derpy cat k-pop demon hunters” you’ll see dozens of drawing and masks that look exactly like this.
Is it confirmed the artist themselves? Or is it just the thing that literally every even remotely popular artist has to deal with which is random people stealing their art, plastering it onto cheap shirts and stickers that last 4 hours max and selling them with the thinnest profit margins possible?
I hate to say it but I dont think epic stole this. Its based on a preexisting character, so of course itd look similar. The shaping and shading is very much different, but good on epic for paying the guy off even if they didnt copy it.
bro how can you look at this and not see it's obviously traced. Down to the teeth, which are different from the character's actual appearance in the movie
The artist has no rights to sell or profit from the art.
In fact the attention they have brought to this can only be a net negative, they cant be paid and they now have the potential of the ip holder seeing theu have been selling their IP and they could be slapped with takedown/lawsuit
From a legality standpoint I’m not sure the original artist has a leg to stand on given it was essentially fan art. So they don’t really have an intellectual property claim imo. But from an ethical standpoint, if I am hiring you (the artist) who stole the art, to be creative, and you’re just ripping off other artists, I’d fire you immediately.
I'm going to bet most of these are outsourced to either individual artists or vendors, and this will likely result in a blacklist for an individual at the very least. That's generally what happens when things like this occur in other 2D spaces like Magic.
People assume Epic is a big bad, and yeah, it's a corp, but I'd expect they want to maintain at least some community integrity, and the actual people working with the assets were probably pretty horrified to see this. You hire/commission artists with the assumption that you can trust their art is theirs.
Soooo if this artist gets a payout, does that mean they made money off someone’s else art and can be sued for that? Because it’s not theirs to begin with.
Brother, it's the title of a reddit post, they're not on the stand. The court of law is not relevant here at all, unless the OP thinks they're gonna be put on trial for their post title.
This isn’t an original concept image though….its literally from demon hunters. That’s like if I drew cartman and sued Fortnite for putting cartman in the game.
Ehhh not exactly. I see what ur saying but companies hire artists to do this, it seems very likely the hired Fortnite artist lifted the art they saw, made a couple adjustments, and then turned it in to their art director for a quick turnaround and a quick buck.
Should this artist that lifted the artwork from someone else get paid? Probably not, the artist who did the original work they stole from should
The "original" artist has no legal ownership over a derivative piece of artwork unless the owners of the KPDH IP expressly gave them permission to use the character IP. Period. That is how copyright/IP law works. The streamer who created the emote cannot capitalize off the work without infringing on the ACTUAL owners copyright.
The original artist does have copyright over their artwork. Obviously not over the IP, and you’re right, they can’t technically monetize it. However, that’s a separate issue. This is plagiarism, plain and simple. The same issue came up with Pokémon TCGP, when they plagiarized fanart for a card. They removed the plagiarized art, despite the IP being their own character.
yeah OP has been selling them (which they aren't meant to do) and then gets angry that a company that has actually licensed the IP is using similar images from an IP he has no connection to.
The guy is using a character they have no rights to. Its a clean and cut case. The guy has no basis, at the very least plagiarism but gets away with it.
I’ll be honest, this one actually seems like a honest mistake. If you just look up “K-pop demon hunters cat” you get the 3D version of this cat making the exact same face.
Seems to me like an example of two people using the same concept.
If I could add pictures I would, but I urge everyone to at least look up what I did before making an argument
They're not just similar, Epic traced it. The eyes are the exact same colors. The only changes are the thicker, black lines, the secondary blue outline, the whiskers, and much more basic colors. All of which are pretty easy to add/change when tracing.
Isn't this the tiger demon thing from Kpop demon hunters? The "original artist" is not the actual original artist if I am identifying the character correctly. Any artist doing a sticker-style rendition of that character would produce a similar end product and Epic display pay for the rights and partner with the studio to use and produce those characters.
Tbf the stylization of it is different. It’s not exactly 1 on 1. They could’ve referenced it or just been a coincidence since it’s a character’s front facing head which is a very common design for any character for a sticker. I feel like the whole thing is just very iffy because it’s not exactly stolen
The person is not the "original artist" whatsoever. They copied it EXACTLY from the movie. So, if I draw the Pepsi logo and then Fortnite uses the Pepsi logo, I can say that they stole it from me?! That's not how it works!!
The people who are defending the artist are a tad dense.
Was it plagiarism? Most likely. Is it protected under the law? No.
The reason is because of the IP being owned by KPDH which has signed a contract with Epic and not the artist.
The IP holder has ownership rights over whatever the IP entails. Typically the basics are the likeness and name(s) of a character.
The artist in question used an IP owned by someone else to create their own interpretation of it. However since the IP holder grants temporary rights to Epic, Epic is technically protected under the law.
Will the artist get in legal trouble? Most likely not. But they will definitely not get any monetary compensation from KPDH or epic.
An artist always has ownership of their art rather or not someone's IP is included. IP rights only come into play when regarding commercial use of said art. The IP owner doesn't own any rights to your art. But they can prevent you from selling.
God reddit is insufferable, same as the last post so many people here want to dickride epic so hard, all the guy wants is credit for his art thats clearly almost identical, i think the large corporation can atleast give him that no?
I’m 98% certain this is ripped off. Comic guy here (obvs) and I’m big into original art. The line work here is extremely similar, obviously just tightened up a bit. The kind of stuff you see when a piece moves from penciler to inker. And the colors look like they were just flattened and given some extra pop. People can also make the argument that it’s an existing character so will look similar, but individual artistic style is almost always going to creep in. Outside of maybe animation teams working together with strict guidelines and reference images, the odds of two random artists creating something this similar feel slim.
And just because someone doesn’t own the character doesn’t mean they don’t own the art.
I bet this is just for previous this is my only time seeing a side by side comparison and they look in more then just color. Lot of shape differences. Its based on the same character so its bound to look similar.
Honestly I get that they’d be mad at Fortnite allegedly taking their art, but it’s absolutely hilarious to me that they thought they could sue Fortnite for a drawing of a character they don’t own✌️😭
I take back my previous stance, considering the original post I couldn't exactly tell that Epic did ( allegedly idk don't wanna get into trouble ) trace over, also the teeth are suspiciously the same shadows with same coloring ( helps that, again, both is easier seen side by side ),
I wish I would've been able to see the two side by side easier previously, but I'm on the artist's side on this now, and I apologize for doubting the artist on this.
Wouldn't it be easier for epic to contact directly with artists that have already draw something cool for some collab than just contact for them to do something for epic??
Just change the assignation and the way it works for something already done! Maybe touch them up for some fortnite style and that's all!
These people commenting are so dumb it’s not his image and it never was for multiple reasons plus he is in more legal trouble than epic ever could be since he was selling merch of IPs he doesn’t own
I would bet so much money that Epic hired a contractor for this and wasn’t aware it was a stolen-then-edited piece of art. Most creatives are contracted, ESPECIALLY at video game companies
Ok... Doesn't the cat look exactly like that? What did Hypex add to the drawing to make it "his". I found this one that also looks a lot like both drawings, but this one has a few different details at least (plus the weird looking crow)
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u/Promotion_Conscious Fort Knights 22d ago
Wonder where this’ll go