Fan Art and Intellectual Property Rights on Electronic Commerce Platforms

Abstract

Problem setting. With the rise of e-commerce in the Digital Age, businesses that focus on making and selling fan merchandise are now widely distributing their products online. Given the issue of distribution, use and management of intellectual property rights in the given context, the problem requires appropriate research. Analysis of recent researches and publications. In the previous studies, broad questions are discussed, but the details and practical implementation of the theory remain outside the attention of scientists. Is it enough to talk about copyright and sometimes about trademarks when it comes to infringement of intellectual property rights by creators of fan art products? What infrastructure do e-commerce platforms offer for fair use of popular works? These questions are relevant, but the answers to them have not yet been sufficiently disclosed in the scientific literature. Purpose of the research is to determine the components of the infrastructure of e-commerce platforms, which ensures the legitimate use of intellectual property of the creators of popular products. Article’s main body. The infrastructure offered by well-known marketplaces has been analyzed. Platforms such as eBay, Etsy, Amazon, Redbubble and Teepublic were selected for the analysis. Infrastructure components such as intellectual property policy, involvement of the right holder and fan art creator, a list of companies open to cooperation, opportunities for communication with the right holder, availability of standard license agreements, the possibility of concluding license agreements through the platform, an accessible portfolio of intellectual property, and the possibility of carrying licenses to other platforms are defined. It has been established that greater specialization in fan art leads to greater efforts to create an infrastructure for the fair use of intellectual property of creators of popular products. At the same time, in the author’s opinion, such platforms could, first of all, make it possible to use licensing agreements beyond the platform and expand the involvement of fan art creators in two-way interaction with the rights holders. Conclusions and prospects for development. The obtained results confirm the relevance, established by previous studies, of studying and improving legal relations between large companies and creators of fan art. The presented study also extends the previous ones in the context of the use of different types of intellectual property in the relevant commercial activity. A significant scientific contribution is the examination of the problem in the context of electronic commerce – this approach allowed opposing the supporters of the opinion that the owners of popular products tend to allow the use of derivatives of such products for the purposes of even greater popularization. This opinion in previous studies has probably been mostly about non-commercial use, but the line between non-commercial and commercial use of fan art is extremely thin. Therefore, precisely in view of the nature of e-commerce, which determines the commercial use of products, the issue of creating an effective infrastructure of e-commerce platforms that ensure the legitimate use of intellectual property of the creators of popular products was revealed in this study.