TomKellyART

oh cool you have some great stuff!

no problem it's cool stuff!!!

Well here is my take with fan art sales. One if I don't own the rights to the character or image then it is pretty much against the law. That being said it's a law that is about as enforced as jay walking or spitting on the sidewalk. Most of the times when the company or person who owns the rights to what you are selling (i.e. the fan art you have made.) they usually send you a written legal notice saying stop what your doing or you will be sued. Some places online such as deviantart, etsy, kickstarter and ebay have rules that state you can't sell stuff you don't own the rights too so those communities sorta self police. Mainly these sites have those rules so the Site can't get sued if someone on there does sell bootleg stuff (material you don't own the copy right for.) as a way to cover those sites asses. T-shirt companies have these rules too and all of these sites don't have the time or energy to enforce their rules so a lot of fan art is sold on all of these places.
Some people will argue that the fan art they make is a humorous parody and because it falls into that classification and it is not subject to the same copyright laws and rules. Still Parody is a very murky water of an exception to the rules so in most cases people get that sorta rule wrong.

 Also the term "fan art" is a huge poorly defined term that usually means characters or things that people Know and recognize even though in some cases there is no copy right issues at all. For example The Wizard of OZ, all the OZ books and characters are in the public domain (this means that NO ONE OWNS THE COPYRIGHTS TO THE WIZARD OF OZ BOOKS AND CHARACTERS). Just google the wizard of OZ and public domain and you can see this info. SO you can do art Of the wizard of OZ say a cool wicked witch of the west or Gelinda the good witch. You just can't use images from the movies or TV shows but if you depict the source material from the books as described in the books or your own versions then you can't be successfully sued for violating copyright laws. so you could draw a tin man on a yellow brick road and violate now copyright laws yet because it's a known character you are still making fan art even though it is both your original tin man design.

So in short just assume that whatever your selling is bootleg i.e. against the law unless you have pain the copyright holder for permission to use said character. Accept that if you do sell fanart that if the copyright holder does tell you formally and legally to stop selling then you should stop so as not to get sued. Accept that many places online may refuse to display your merch due to it's suspect nature or they may just pull your stuff once they are aware of the situation. Finally be aware that even if you have bought the right,have legal permission to sell the items and or the character in question is public domain you will still get people yelling at you for copyright violations and many get your stuff pulled from sites because very very few people understand the laws and the exceptions to them. Many many people sell all sorts of fan art online and never get into any major trouble or fines or go to jail, usually they just get their page pulled or materials taken down or told legally to stop.