Wait are we talking “Ah they took my freakin’ kidney!” Charlie the Unicorn?
The irony is, if Adult Swim didn’t try to insist on their having 100% creative control over Charlie The Unicorn when it was pitched to Adult Swim, Charlie would BE in Multiversus.
I really hope the editor who okayed this was fired. It was probably some young well intentioned guy who was just a big fan of Charlie The Unicorn and thought it’d be neat to see them in the game, but had no understanding of how copyright works. I don’t blame him, he was probably new and naive, but there should have been a supervisor or someone in legal to stop and ask “Wait, do we own that?”
That’s why they’re a 40 billion dollar company instead of a 39.999999999 billion dollar company.
You dumb dumb, one doesn’t simply become a 40BUSD company without exploitation of labour. There is no such thing as ethic billionaires, only parasites with good PR.
Anyone got a non-Xitter mirror of the ad?
I tend to be in the “fuck corporations” camp, but this doesn’t really look like they’re stealing his work. It looks nothing like the original Charlie the Unicorn. The original Charlie was gray, while this creature is white and rainbow. This is just a reference.
As an analogy, Borderlands 2 has a sniper rifle names The Storm, and it has the red flavor text “tut tut, looks like rain”, which is a quote from Winnie the Pooh. I personally wouldn’t call that exploitation. You could try to make an argument, but it’s so minor and indirect that any argument wouldn’t hold any water
They are definitely using Charlie the Unicorn to advertise it, with the text in that tweet. But also use actual clips of audio from the cartoon in the full video advertisement.
It’s not clear from the screenshot but the advertisement used audio directly from his original video; that was his issue.
See https://www.reddit.com/r/MultiVersus/comments/1hk71b8/comment/m3czdlk/.
I think the combination of calling him Charlie, making him a unicorn-like creature, and going to a place called Candy (Kingdom instead of Mountain) makes it a little more than mere friendly homage for my liking. Probably not enough to give rise to a legal claim of copyright or trademark infringement, but enough to be ethically very shaky.
It’s like if that Borderlands sniper was also an anthropomorphised polar bear from the 100 Acre Tundra.
They could have just licensed Charlie from Steele. It would actually look good then.
They mention a character Charlie, unicorns, and a candy place. I don’t know why they are being so careful to avoid accusations of stealing the author’s work, because that’s exactly what they’re doing. People who are familiar with Charlie the unicorn are supposed to recognize it here, and spend their money on Warner Bros merchandise. How could you possibly not see this as theft?
Are pop culture references theft? No.
No they aren’t, but they directly used audio from it.
There’s a difference between WoW having a character named Harrison Jones who’s largely a parody of Indiana Jones who’s quests are archaeology based and kinda silly. It’s another thing entirely if they used repurposed clips from Raiders of the Lost Ark for his voicelines.
I’ve seen a number of references to my work in big-company projects before. For example, there’s a dead unicorn with an enchanted kidney named Charlie in World of Warcraft. This is fine! It’s completely within fair-use laws. Using my audio directly is not fair use.
Copyright law, at least in the United States, is heavily weighted towards protecting large corporations. Warner Bros is one of the largest media companies in the world, and it often uses IP law like a weapon against smaller artists. Notable examples include MeatCanyon, whose clear fair use parody video “Wabbit Season” was forcibly removed from YouTube, and Vera Drew, whose parody film “The People’s Joker” received a cease and desist letter from WB, initially derailing its film festival premiere schedule.
So WB wasn’t just making a reference, but also lifting audio from Steele’s work while also shutting down other’s fair use parodies.
Plagiarism is theft, idiot.
Actually, not necessarily. Plagiarism is not interchangeable with copyright infringement. Plagiarism is specifically academic misconduct.
Those videos that upload an entire movie to YouTube and put “no copyright infringement intended” in the description are not committing plagiarism, because they are being honest about how the content they are using is not their own. But they are committing copyright infringement.
Likewise, you can do plagiarism while not doing copyright infringement, if you take something that is public domain and use it in your research paper without explaining where you got it. It’s public domain, so there’s nothing legally wrong there. But it’s academically dishonest.
Mere references aren’t plagiarism, idiot.
They’re … selling his content without his permission
Oh my god are you stupid? Can you read??? Someone help this poor fool! He’s engaging in debate and has no ability to keep up!
Did they use that flavor text to advertise the game?
It’s been taken down on xitter now
Very interesting. Now I even more want to see what it was.
