I also wanna add by saying you guys actually have no idea how fucking awesome you all are. Yes I'm an emotional mess currently but doesn't make it any less true.
Seems a bit up in the air on the copyright bit.
I would suggest it would be pretty unusual for the rights to belong to the freelancer and not the person who commissioned the work.
He could be a chancer, but it’s a fair point. In this case I wouldn’t be surprised if the artist’s brief was very (very) loose and hand-wavy, leaving him to do most of the actual decision-making.
If I commission some photography, copyright naturally remains with the photographer. Even if I’m art directing the shoot, and am considered the creative behind the output. I’m only buying usage rights (which can be exclusive usage rights) – unless I specifically put transfer of copyright into our contract. It’s the photographer who retains the right to reuse or resell the images later.
Same for an illustrator. Or a copywriter. What’s different about a 3D modeller, or visualiser?
Just the way I have found it to be. Probably the origins of the industry being different.
Usage is more limited as well in general so its not much of an issue to be addressed before now.
Perhaps it needs to change but thats the way it is currently.
Normally self promotional usage is retained with caveats and the artist should always make sure they retain the working files or are well compensated, unless the working files themselves are collaborative.
It all comes down to the contract though. Its probably whatever the default is on Freelancer.com in this scenario. She will probably win thouigh, she has $500mil and he has whatever pitiful amount he got from freelancer.com.
Given the standard of the piece I would say if the 3d guy got paid anything he has been well compensated and the value has been added by whoever this woman is and her ability to drum up half a mil for that video.
I have a radical, game-changing, disruptive idea for Atari’s hotly anticipated comeback. How about actually, y’know, making and releasing a games console?
Lil’ Miquela (who is a fictional social media influencer – 3D rendered character puppeted by a PR team) is now selling an entire alternate reality narrative game/quest as NFTs. So you have to keep buying more of them to play the game.
Nintendo must be looking at this and making the link with Pokemon by now, right? Gotta catch ’em all and buy the digital rights of ownership to all 100-and-whatever of them. There are multimillionaire geeks out there who would pay millions of dollars to be the ‘owner’ of their favourite Pokemon.
You've already got imitation Pokemon NFTs and games out there. I was in GHST for a while which is a token for a Tamagotchi/Pokemon hybrid game for whales.
Aye, and those shitty pixel CryptoPunks avatars are one of the OG examples. I was just thinking that the genuine thing, sold by Ninty themselves, would grab Beeple-at-Christie’s level money and media attention.