I, like a typical millennial, am a massive Harry Potter fan. I took the requisite pilgrimage to Universal Studios Orlando a couple of years ago and I, of course, had to go in costume. The photo ops were too exciting to pass up! This picture of me, dressed as a generic Beauxbatons student, highlights one of the modern gray areas of intellectual property law: cosplay.<\/p>\r\n
Cosplay is the act of creating costumes (sometimes very elaborate costumes) to invoke beloved characters from media such as movies, books, tv shows, and video games. These costumes are often worn at conventions, festivals, or, for less glamorous nerds like me, amusement parks, book release parties, and themed pub trivia nights.<\/p>\r\n
There are a lot of elements of copyright law that come into play when considering cosplay. The character the cosplay is based on is almost always part of a copyright protected work. And, if the cosplay is based on the costume design(s) created in a movie or other work of art (like my Beauxbatons costume) the costume designer for that movie and\/or the movie production company may hold copyright protection as well. Most creators of copyright protected material allow (some even encourage) cosplay as a form of free advertisement and creative expression of fan art. There is even some argument that non-commercial cosplay participation is defended by the fair use doctrine, which is a defense against infringement claims should an infringement lawsuit be brought.<\/p>\r\n
Cosplay becomes risky when it\u2019s used for commercial purposes (like accepting money for photographs or being paid by the event to attend in costume). While some content creators and copyright holders will turn a blind eye to this, there is a chance that they could seek to enforce their copyright against any commercial use of their protected material. Best practice is to seek a license to dress as your favorite character if you intend to seek any compensation or commercial use of your cosplay. If you have further questions about cosplay, fair use, and monetizing cosplay, please schedule a free consultation with Iconic Trademarks!<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I, like a typical millennial, am a massive Harry Potter fan. I took the requisite pilgrimage to Universal Studios Orlando a couple of years ago and I, of course, had to go in costume. The photo ops were too exciting to pass up! This picture of me, dressed as a generic Beauxbatons student, highlights one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":561,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iconictrademarks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iconictrademarks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iconictrademarks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iconictrademarks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iconictrademarks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=198"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/iconictrademarks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":558,"href":"https:\/\/iconictrademarks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198\/revisions\/558"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iconictrademarks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iconictrademarks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iconictrademarks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iconictrademarks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}