Cave Story + Other Videogame T-Shirts

Okay, the online Cave Story and Gaming merchandise store is open!
We sell T-Shirts, mugs, smartphone cases, and much more.

Here is an item that sells for $23.99:

You can substitute your own image. For example, you could put an onlineworms image onto the shirt if you have his permission to do that. You can also put some text on the shirt.
Prices vary depending on size and what you put on the shirt.

If you want to make a buy offer, message me on Cave Story forums or visit my Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/oliver.chu2

 

This is possible. YAY!

 

It's not like anyone owns the rights to Cave Story.

 

It's not like anyone owns the rights to Cave Story.

Selling T-Shirts of fanart should be fine. It's fair use and Pixel / Nicalis allow people to draw fanart.

 

Yay legalities. I don't know if I intend to buy fanart necessarily, but I am a narcissist who would make things to put on a shirt for myself. You should have seen the look on my face at school when I found out they printed custom posters. Narcissism will fill my bedroom walls!

I'd make the art a bit smoother before selling it, it doesn't look like it was made with print in mind.

 

Legalese and discussion.

Spoiler

To make it clear from the outset, Fair Use doesn't preclude an individual/group of indivudals from being sued. It is an affirmative defense that can be raised if you're sued for making use of someone else's copyrighted material.

In any event, I've never been sure as to whether or not Fair Use mitigates/offsets liability in cases where fan content has been created and subsequently sold for profit. On Etsy and at conventions I see people selling their fanart/fan craft creations of characters from anime, comic series etc, and even characters that definitely have a registered trademark (i.e. Mickey Mouse and Hatsune Miku, the Vocaloid). In the vast majority of cases, the creation of fan content, commentary and parody are protected by the defense of Fair Use. But the courts have made it clear that merely being non-profitable doesn't automatically make use fair (we are talking about 'fair' in legal terms, and not in it's ordinary meaning). And, bearing that in mind, doesn't it seem like fan-created content being sold is actually more at risk?

Anyway, I don't even know who holds the rights to Cave Story. But my hunch is that it's actually Nicalis you would have to fear a suit from, not Pixel himself. And even so, you cannot normally copyright/trademark a character (i.e. Curly Brace). Holding onto trademarks requires a yearly fee. There's a reason why Hatsune Miku and Mickey Mouse are trademarked, but Phoenix Wright and Quote aren't (random examples).

I'm not saying you could get into trouble for doing this (unless Nicalis is really mean), and you're probably like 99% safe, I'm just having some thoughts.

As for the t-shirt design itself, welcome to the reason I like transparent images: You can actually use them for things. It would be good to clean it up a little and also to remove the whitespace from around the image and to make it transparent. The reason? Because if it's printed as is, the company that prints the tees is going to actually use white transfer for all that white space, whereas you don't really want that. It's hard to explain.... Maybe I'll draw a diagram later.

Anyone remember that Balrog shirt? I remember that after Pixel said he was displeased with it, one of the people who really wanted that shirt paid a fee directly to the designer and printed the shirt himself. Having a unique shirt is pretty cool.

Edit: Open letter to Nicalis/Pixel: We want merchandise. We bought several renditions of Cave Story, we will buy merch as well. There is a market for CS merch. Tumblr had a discussion about this. It received more than a hundred notes. There are probably even more people out there that are interested that I don't know about.

 

If Nicalis complains we will stop all sales and maybe even recall some merchandise.

 

huf this is expensive!

 

What Matt and Dinny said about smoothness. Not only that but you may wanna consider redrawing it to be a full body shot. I think it would look awkward on a tshirt if it is just a drawing that's cut off near her legs. Doesn't look very nice.

 

Well I accidentally can't art. Better fanart would look good on a t-shirt.

 

You did a bad job of adding the image to the shirt, try actually doing it and then taking a picture.

 

i would get a shirt endorsing CS, if it was a decent one, anyway

 

I'm buying one of these in the near future, so I'm putting it here in case anyone else is interested.

 

You did a bad job of adding the image to the shirt, try actually doing it and then taking a picture.

You moron that image is actually on the T-shirt. It's not pasted on with an image editor. The rectangular frame is a feature, not a bug.

 

You moron that image is actually on the T-shirt. It's not pasted on with an image editor. The rectangular frame is a feature, not a bug.

The weird same-colored frame that looks awkward is a 'feature'.

right. Good luck selling your shirts if that's the kind of rude language you're going to use with potential customers. As for me, I'll be taking my business elsewhere (or not at all).