Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Licensing Headaches - A Blast from the Past

Back in the days when I was interning for an unnamed company in the industry during college, I bumped into my first licensing headache. At the time, I didn't realize the intricate workings of "licensing" and my response to the situation was delayed to say the least. I was an IT intern and one of the projects I was assisting with was their website relaunch. As a fun and exciting project, I was helping them out with wallpapers, which was not IT and definitely not my expertise. Nevertheless, they assured me that it was easy. All I had to do was resize or crop the image and add the property titles to it. After I finished, I was excited that my work would be on the website. I informed my supervisor and he put it aside. The next couple of days I overheard disturbing news. The artists did not ok it. Legal issues if we put it up. All these things I had NO CLUE about. They eventually scrapped the whole wallpapers section from the website and I was bummed.

Years later, I would realize that the above scenario was an everyday occurence. However, it does seem that the artists have relaxed a bit in regards to their artwork being used to promote their titles. Granted, not all artists are like that. There will always be artists that will not let you put their artwork on anything, and there will always be artists that are ecstatic that you are using their artwork to promote their titles.

The point of the story is... that I didn't realize my mistake until I made the same one years after. But you know what? It's not my fault. I blame Allie and Tissie for it (even though they weren't there at the time). :P

~Meg

4 comments:

aoi_aka said...

Hahahahaha! I blame Amy for everything too. XD

Anonymous said...

Crap, I had a response typed out, but a library patron came up and everything got erased.

You better watch yourself, Aoi. I'm watching you.

Poor Meg. ANN just did a discussion on copyright infringement and it sounds like one hell of a headache. The speaker mentioned that it's often the artist's decision to let others use their artwork. It's just a great big complicated mess.

Allie said...

It figures. I get blamed for EVERYTHING, and most of the time, it's Tissie's fault. Even when she's admitted that it was her fault, I STILL got in trouble. *sticks out her tongue at Tissie and Meg*

Tissie said...

I am taking the 5th on this discussion. I didn't see, hear or do anything.

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