Interesting. I struggle to see how they can copyright anything more substantive that the names used in the books. The generic ‘Barbarian’ figure, minus the Conan name, seems a nebulous thing to try and assert copyright over.

No doubt the devil is in the detail, so will need someone to dig through the full ruling to work out what it really means 🙂

Calling it Conan was bad judgement from they part because otherwise they could had gotten away from it.

It will probably still affect their business (if any) inside the USA though.
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Given that it looks almost exactly like the cover art I would have expected the artist to sue instead.

Or is the image tied directly to the Conan universe so as to make no difference in court ?
Is commissioned art a special exception ?

Being outside the US may not save the guy as Spain has bilateral agreements with the US.

The name of something is covered by trademark, not by copyright, and you can’t avoid copyright infringement just by changing the name.

@redben I guess that’s why in everything that Mythic have done with Solomon Kane you have stressed that it’s all been approved 🙂

You can’t copyright anything, only claim ownership of it. Unlike trademarks and patents which need to be registered, copyright is an inherent right granted to creative works purely by virtue of their creation. It only covers elements of the work which can be considered original, lasts for a fixed period of time, and can be transferred by the owner to another party. As the name suggests, it is literally the right to make copies and only the copyright holder and those they grant permission to have the right to make any copies of the original work. This includes across creative formats and is why you have to have permission from Joanne Rowling to make Harry Potter movie, or a range of Harry Potter miniatures, even though her creative works were in a different creative format. You don’t need her permission to do a movie about a boarding school for wizards as that is not original to her work. The specific expression of it is original and you do need permission to copy that.

What’s most interesting about this story is that the license holder chose to pursue. This is a small industry in which this practice has often either evaded detection or been too small to bother with. It in turn has created the erroneous opinion amongst many in the industry that there is nothing wrong with doing it. Either because they can change the names and it won’t be infringement, or that making miniatures from other people’s art or stories is fine and should not be infringement.

I thought Conan, like Cthulhu, was now public domain since the authors died so long ago?