[piaste]

Copyright covers the specific work of art you created, not anything that looks like it. Birdman didn't violate Batman's copyright even being an international callback. Nor did every superhero movie that tried really hard to copy Nolan's style after his trilogy.

It was perfectly fine in 2023 to create a cartoon about a prankster mouse called Nicholas sailing a steamboat. What became legal in 2024, with the copyright expiration, was to give him those exact pants and ears and call him Mickey.

I'm not familiar with Pokémon, so I'm not sure if the PW cartoon monsters are literal copies of the originals or just drawn in the same style.

[rantallion]

Copyright laws vary between countries. I imagine a UK court might treat things differently, given our Copyright Service's rules:

> Legally only the copyright owner has the right to authorise adaptations and reproductions of their work - this includes the making of a derivative work.

But of course, this all comes down to whether or not a court considers it derivative, which is what I was curious about.

https://copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p22_derivative_work...