Can I keep my characters in my book or should I just give up with them?
My OCs (Original Characters) were stolen by an older person. She may or may not have copyrighted them. A few years ago I was like 13 and I posted some characters I made up and I really love them. One day I got on and saw someone posted the character I made and called it her own. Of course, we got into a whole argument and she said that she basically had more of a right to the character than I because she was better at art than I was. Well I thought she gave up and a few years later, I saw she was still posting I pictures of him and calling him her own.
Now see, I don't have a profile with a lot of followers and she does so I don't know what to do. I'm not good at art or writing and I'm 17 years old now. I feel like crying because both the characters she stole are very important in my story and she just dresses them up in maids outfits online.
I feel like I've been mugged of everything I ever worked for. I've been working on this story for 4 years just to find that some uncreative person with a little bit of talent took the most important thing I've ever made.
Can I keep my characters in my book or should I just give up with them?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/33101. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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[Not a Lawyer, nobody's a lawyer here]
Double, triple and quadruple down, make them Creative Commons. I don't think said person have copyrighted them, but if she did, that's already grounds for exterminating the human race.
Back to the point, creative commons and public domain are like the Death Stars of copyrighting, because They're simple and powerful. You can't claim Greek mythology (a public domain) to be your invention, nor can anyone else. If your characters are under a specific creative commons license, you can keep them, and they can't be claimed by anyone else as their own, though they still can use them (down here in the internet's darkest pits, we call this use fanfiction/fanart/r34) but must credit you as the original creator.
Though I must say, does she really know and makes them better than you, their creator, does?! If not, you can point that out to her. However, if for instance, I have to choose between Reki Kawahara's Kirito or his abridged persona, created by Something Witty Entertainment, I'd chose abridged Kirito as he was A BETTER CHARACTER THAN THE ORIGINAL by 200%.
Seeing other people handle characters better than their creator is nothing new, and it can be boiled down to these "fixers" being unbiased, easily recognizing the flaws of a character and seeing them for what they really are.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33106. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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A few years ago I was like 13 and I posted some characters I made up and I really love them.
If the stolen characters are still recognisably the same characters from that post, then you have incontrovertible, time-stamped proof that you are their original creator. If you still have screenshots of your correspondence with her (or access to them to take screenshots), then that's further proof, as she basically admitted to you that she stole them.
Again, I am not a lawyer, so I can't tell you whether that proof will stand up in a court of law. But it will stand up in the court of social media. So keep on posting your characters, and if anyone accuses you of ripping off that other woman, you can post your screenshots and show that it's the other way around.
If they are not recognisably the same characters, then they're not the same characters anymore. They're her own not-quite-original characters. In that case, the characters you originally created when you were 13 still belong to you, and you can keep on posting them with inpunity.
In short: regardless of what she's done with them, they're still your characters, you can prove they're your characters, and you can absolutely keep on doing whatever you like with them.
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