using Miku's hair ornaments and twintails).

To the best of my understanding, the actual designs in the given sample are derivative works based on adapting the original character designs (e.g. intellectual property in both Japanese and English. That said, people break these rules all the time, especially outside of Japan, where enforcement would be expensive, anyway.ĭisclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I have read and/or signed many contracts w.r.t. 1st PLACE, meanwhile, has a slightly more generous license where there's no restrictions with noncommercial use and very few restrictions for using the character commercially when decorating a CD.īasically, to be fully in the clear, you have to abide by those guidelines, and for that to happen with gray-area stuff like the whole 'noncommercial' phrase, you'd probably have to hire a lawyer to be 100% sure. Before Crypton adopted CC, they had two licenses available-the Piapro Character License when you are not generating any revenue, and Piapro Link for when you are generating revenue even if it's breaking event/nonprofit/noncommerical. The definition of 'noncommercial' for CC has been known to be kind of contentious, with extremes such as not being allowed on YouTube because YouTube collects ad revenue. Crypton's VOCALOID characters, for example, are made available via the CC BY-NC license (attribution-noncommercial). That being said, different companies treat their copyright differently, and some companies have blanket licenses to cover their characters. Technically, since the artwork on each poster is a derivative work of the original character design, and you are using the names of the characters, these posters are by default infringing on copyright without additional permission from the copyright holder.

Ia vocaloid fanart