According to Epic Games’ legal department, fan art is illegal and an “infringement of trademark.” Emilio Lopez, who did an absolutely awesomely cute fan art of Marcus Fenix, the chainsaw-toting hero of Gears of War, for his cousin, was surprised (to say the least) to find a cease-and-desist letter from Epic. Thankfully, Mark Rein set things right: he actually apologized for the incident, saying that the lawyers overreacted.

Ugh. Our lawyers are trying to do their job and protect our trademarks but I guess they didn’t realize this wasn’t a commercial project and they fired off a standard form letter. It is unfortunate when this happens but the problem with trademarks is you HAVE to protect them and Emilio’s work looks so amazingly professional, right down to a cool package!, that they probably failed to notice this was a one-off gift for non-commercial use. What we need to do is come up with some sort of permission letter for things like these so that we’re properly protecting our future commercial rights but not stopping people from doing cool fan art like this.

Other companies can actually learn a thing or two from this guy. Does anyone remember Microsoft cancelling the excellent Halo-RTS fan mod? Didn’t that smell of overreaction, too?