Fan Art, IP Law and Why Every Frame We Make Starts With Our Own Imagination

Fan art is one of the best things about gaming culture. Scroll through any collector community and you'll find incredible illustrations, reimagined box art, custom posters and tributes to the games people love. It's a sign of how deeply these worlds get under our skin, and we'd never knock anyone for picking up a pencil or a stylus because a game moved them.

Where things get murky is when that art stops being a personal passion project and starts being sold. That's a line we decided very early on we would never cross, and we want to explain why.

What the law actually says

In the UK, copyright is covered by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. You don't have to register anything for it to apply. The moment an artist creates an original piece, whether that's a character design, a cover illustration or a logo, it's protected automatically. For artistic works, that protection lasts for the lifetime of the creator plus 70 years.

Copyright gives the owner the exclusive right to copy the work and to adapt it. The law also covers copying a "substantial part" of a work, which is judged on quality rather than quantity. So redrawing a famous character in a new pose, tracing over official artwork or lifting the recognisable elements of a cover and dropping them into your own design can all count as infringement. You'll often hear people say that changing something by 10 or 20 percent makes it yours. That rule doesn't exist. It's a myth that's got a lot of people into trouble.

On top of copyright, game titles, logos and franchise names are usually registered trade marks under the Trade Marks Act 1994, which is a separate layer of protection altogether.

The UK doesn't have the broad "fair use" doctrine that people often quote from American forums. What we have instead is a set of narrow fair dealing exceptions, including one for caricature, parody and pastiche that came in back in 2014. Those exceptions have to be genuinely fair though, and selling copies of someone else's characters for profit, in a way that competes with the original, is very hard to defend. Courts here have already shown that famous characters can be protected in their own right, and that calling something a pastiche isn't a get out of jail free card.

Even across the Atlantic, where fair use does exist, the US Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that the commercial licensing of an Andy Warhol print based on a photographer's image of Prince wasn't fair use. If one of the most celebrated artists of the last century couldn't lean on "I changed it", a print on Etsy isn't going to fare much better.

Making something based on existing art isn't making it from scratch

This is the bit that gets lost in a lot of online debates. If you take an existing piece of art and rework it, you haven't created something from nothing. You've started with someone else's creativity, someone else's hours and someone else's ideas, and built on top of them. However skilled the execution, the foundation isn't yours.

We see plenty of products out there that are sold as "original designs" when the heavy lifting was clearly done by an illustrator at a games studio. Legally it's infringement. Morally, however it's spun, we see it as theft, and we don't want any part of it.

What we've learned from the people who police this

Over the years we've had conversations with agencies that work with some of the biggest brands in gaming. We wanted to understand exactly where the boundaries sit, what we can and can't do, and how rights holders view businesses like ours.

The message was pretty clear. Publishers and their agencies actively monitor for misuse of their IP, and it doesn't take long for a cease and desist to land in your inbox if you've blatantly copied their work. Listings get pulled, stock becomes worthless and, in the worst cases, legal costs follow. For a small business that's a huge risk, and frankly it's one that isn't worth taking when you've got ideas of your own.

Why our designs stay minimal

That's the real reason our frames look the way they do. We keep things clean and minimal so the focus sits where it belongs, on the game, the steelbook or the card you already own and love. The artwork in your collection was licensed, paid for and produced properly, and our job is to show it off, not to reproduce it.

It also means there's no drama. Nobody can call us out for ripping off an artist, because everything we've made came out of our own heads, our own workshop and our own trial and error.

On being copied ourselves

We'd be lying if we said we hadn't seen our own ideas pop up elsewhere. Frame designs that look awfully familiar, features we introduced to the physical media scene appearing on other walls. Honestly, we take it as flattery. When we came along, the way collectors displayed their games and steelbooks looked very different, and we're proud of the impact we've had on the community since.

We're not going to spend our energy worrying about it either. We'll keep innovating in the ways only we can, because the people copying are always going to be a step behind the people doing the thinking.

Where that leaves us

We'll never use art created by someone else for monetary gain. Not in our frames, not on our plaques and not in our marketing, unless we've been given explicit consent we're able to by the relevant copyright owners. If you want a frame that celebrates your collection without borrowing anyone else's creativity to do it, that's exactly what we build, handcrafted here in the UK, with UV-protective glazing as standard, designed to let the real art do the talking.

Gaming is an art and we believe you should show off the art you treasure the most.