It is a rare day that a Kickstarter campaign – and a successful one, raising $30000 – for a comic book goes on to detail intellectual property infringement as a legal risk for the venture:
While we firmly believe that our parody, created with love and affection, fully falls within the boundary of fair use, there may be some people who believe that this might be in violation of their intellectual property rights. And we may have to spend time and money proving it to people in black robes. And we may even lose that.
The statement was made by the project’s creators, Glenn Hauman, David Friedman, and Ty Templeton, and their Connecticut company ComicMix LLC.
ComicMix is a website providing news and reviews on comic books. (Interestingly, it features a column, “The Law is an Ass”, written by Bob Ingersoll, an Ohio-based attorney and comic book writer.)
Ty Templeton is well known for his work on various “Batman” comics, published by American publisher DC Comics, and has won various Eisner and Joe Shuster awards for his creative efforts on comic books. Glenn Hauman has worked on various Star Trek novels and electronic publications, and knows enough about the law, according to Wikipedia, to have been the chair of the Netlaw special interest group of the World Wide Web Artists Consortium.
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