In general as soon as you are using parts of or a strong resemblance to copyrighted work you are in for trouble. Your whole description makes it clear that in your example the goal is to get an advantage by making your work similar to copyrighted artwork. Prohibiting this is the main reason for the existence of copyrights.
I think the reciprocal rights granted for challenge entries are extremely fair.
Cheers
Björn
Our description of Derivative works is a summary of how international copyright is defined and implimented. It’s not something we made up just for this challenge.
Copyright - Derivative Works
Greg Bear has granted CGSociety permission to base this challenge on his novel, EON. As EON is published work we need to be very clear regarding how copyright works in this situation.
When you have finished your work will be yours - you hold the Copyright for it as a derivative work, inspired by EON, a novel by Greg Bear. You will be free to show your finished work anywhere you want as long as it is in a non-commercial context and you include in the credit these words inspired by EON, a novel by Greg Bear. You cannot make any claim or imply in nay way that you created the work for Greg Bear and must not allow your work to appear in any form under EON or Greg Bear imprimatur.
As a derivate work you can not use your work in any commercial manner without gaining written permission from Greg Bear.
The arrangment is reciprocal. Greg Bear does not have any claim to your work other than being the inspiration for it. Should it be used by Greg Bear or the publishers of EON they are required to seek your permission to use your work.
In no way is the challenge designed to generate art work for Greg Bear or anyone other than yourself – the entrant. If your work does in some way atract commercial interest then that is great – you just need to be aware of the way derivative works are defined and work.
Even though it’s a nice topic, i’ve never read EON and i find the topic to be a bit limited concerned freedom. I know you can do a lot of things with this topic but it has to have something in common with EON, compared to the previous challenges i think this one is a bit more limited. Still i’m participating, but i hope i can come up with a good idea that also has something in common with EON.
Hey thanks for taking the time to address my concerns. But this is where I see things as different, George Lucas has finnished visual art and product. I can look Lucas art and see if I’ve created something that owned by Lucas, this book by said writer dosen’t have established visual art nothing that said writer can claim as copywritable. Its just a book no images though I’ve only seen the cover and never heard about it until today. People are creating intelectual properties for any future movies for free by entering this contest. You ask them to give up commerical rights to avoid any lawsuits. The only reason you’d ask people to do that is to get free work to help develop proporties for a possible movie. Since you can just take bits and pieces of people orignal art here and change them enough to avoid lawsuits, said production will never have to ask for permission. I feel the ‘intent’ of this challege is save a pre production studio hundreds of thousands of dollars by not having to hire artist.
The word ‘intent’ is key here, what is the intent on asking people to give up commerical rights. I feel CGTalk is entering a grey area of the law. Why should artist give up their rights for this challenge, they haven’t had to in the past. Now if this was a Lucas Fan Art challenge you wouldn’t even have to ask people to give up their commercial rights because as they would have ever had them to begin with. But for this challengs it’s not the case. Your asking them to give up commercial rights for what intent? Answering that question is what scares me. Pretty soon every production studio will start a forum and have challenges, think about it that way, this can’t be legal. I love this web site but I’m really floored in astonishment on whats going on.
This sounds a bit paranoid to me. Do you realy think CGSociety is nothing but an ideas and artwork harvester for movie companies?
Cheers
Björn
I can only guess as to why CGTalk asks people to give up commerical right for art posted publicly for a art compitition. I hope for CGTalk that’s its legal.
Personally if I’m going to waist my personal time making somthing I want to be able to own it and sell it.
The rules cover this rather good imo, commercial rights are not given up by either side. As it is proper any commercial use from either side will need a seperate agreement.
I simply can’t see your problem with this.
Cheers
Björn
Hey All! I found out the contest was going on last night, ran out and picked up a copy of Eon, finished it today (roughly 24 hours after I found out about it). I have to say thanks to Greg Bear for writing it, as it was an intellectually stimulating and overall entertaining work of fiction. SO even if I wasn’t competing in the contest, I feel as if I’ve found a new author to read, which is always a +.
Interesting format thats been picked out for the contest as well, with the new addition of film trailer. I really think its an inspired move on the part of cgs.
As far as legal bindings and not being able to offer this work for sale, I feel that its a contest, the work is made for the contest. We are still able to use it in a noncommercial sense, so it may be included in any portfolio we wish to offer up.
SOOOO, good luck to all entries, I hope to see some epic artwork come from the contest!
Then dont.
Honestly, if you dont want to enter into this contest, then dont enter the contest. If you are that afraid that this is a huge conspiracy by CGTalk and Greg Bear to ‘steal’ your ‘intellectual property’-then by all means-do not enter. Nobody is infringing on your rights here.
I find it interesting that in the previous contest, ‘The Journey Begins’, the major complaint after judging, was that the topic was to broad, and allowed for to much interpretation. Here we have people complaining about the opposite.
These challenges are supposed to do that-challenge. This is providing as realisitic ‘studio experience’ as possible-where you will be working to flesh out someone elses vision. I applaud Ballistic Media for pushing the boundries of the challenge yet again.
If you feel this is to constricted, and wish to (in your personal time) create your own 3d images, depiciting your own fictional characters or worlds, then do so.
To me all of this seems like petty playground banter.
Initially I was wondering why people were so concerned, but I do understand where TastyBITS is coming from, both ethically and legally. Especially after reading on Greg’s news section on his site how a few months ago they were try to get one of his other books onto TV/film. Difference in ‘concept design’ caused the project to go no further…
But I always curse others for uninformed assumptions so I’ll not go there myself. I am not going to concern myself with these issues for now, and get into the creativity and community fun. 
That said, if Eon gets turned into a movie in the next few years as a result of this increase in interest, sales, and concept designs, I’ll merrily join the CG lynch mob. :twisted:
GL to all! :bounce:
Requiring written permission from the author means the artist has given up commercial rights no matter how you word it. Now if you tell me that ‘he’s a nice guy’, then why not just give the artists rights to sell the work they make for this challenge without written permission?
Why not simply skip this challenge entirely? If you don’t like it, don’t be a part of it.
It’s really that simple.
.
guys really this is getting out of hand! If you don’t like the challenge don’t take part and if you don’t trust CGTalk don’t be a member either.
The very definition of the challenge is that your contribution must be based on the given artwork (a book in this case). You don’t want to give up commercial rights on artwork you created based on the artwork of another artist, but expect that same artist to give up his rights in return?
Are we living on the same planet?
Cheers
Björn
So you are saying that he (Greg Bear) must give up the rights to Eon so that a separate company (Ballistic Media) that has no ‘official’ link to the Greg Bear name, other than this challenge, can host a contest whereby he is ALLOWING ‘us’ (the artists) to use HIS intellectual property in creating the artwork?
Of course… :rolleyes:
Ignore him. There’s no point in arguing with people who think they understand intellectual property law when they actually don’t…there’s no winning there. Let him go and join deviantArt if he is that deluded about intellectual property law (he’d make a great mod over there).
I went scouring for this book but found nothing sob I went to all the second hand book shops and everything; there simply isn’t a copy for sale in Dublin. So I bought one for 1c from Amazon…and the shipping is $9.98 so it’s not too bad really. Just have to wait for it to arrive…which could be a substantial amount of time. :rolleyes::shrug:
andrea i’m in dublin at the moment! freelancing and not sure where are the bookstores anyway 
places like waterstones dont have it u reckon?
I went to the Waterstones here in Manchester, which is a pretty huge one, and they only had one copy.
No one is asking you to give up the commercial rights, because you don’t have them to give.
The point that you are missing is that while the “idea” can’t be copyrighted, the “description” can be. So the image of Luke Skywalker was already protected even before the first picture was painted of him.
In this case, there may be no prior visual depictions of the characters and events described in the book. However, they are still copyrighted. You cannot legally make an image based on the descriptions in the book and then sell it. They are copyrighted already.
I don’t know if making an image based on the book for a challenge would fall under educational fair use even without Mr. Bear’s consent, but in no circumstances could you claim commercial rights to your derivative work.