The mere fact that something has been sold does not make it a licensed product. SMT were, until recently, producing top quality model kits of Star Wars vehicles. They don't do it anymore because Lucasfilm caught up with them and told them to stop. Of course, the models are still available from some places. But they aren't official. They were never licensed.Vympel said:
There is a huge difference between commercially sold blueprints (which they were) and a fanfic cooked up and distributed freely on the internet I'm afraid. Unless you can find a Lucasfilm source that says explicitly that they're not official, you don't have a case. I'm also highly leery of relying on the memory of someone who did the thing in question well over 20 years ago.
Particularly at Elvis and Beatles conventions, as well as online, there are people selling paintings of the musicians. But they aren't licensed.
A quick google should turn up half a dozen companies specialising in Fan Art, usually based on Anime, but one company currently advertising on E-bay is happy to be comissioned to draw Star Wars or any other sci-fi pictures for you.
Anyone who's been to a music concert will have seen the dodgy blokes outside selling posters and T-shirts out of cardboard boxes. None of them are licensed, despite being sold commercially.
Finally, if I had any aptitude for drawing, I could draw pictures for my friends and family, or even a one-off for a charity auction, based on any fictional sci-fi universe I wanted, provided I never tried to pass them off as official works. If I was a famous artist, with a connection to Sci-fi movie making, these could even make their way into a public sale, and twenty years down the line interpreted by a fan as very rare, official works. But they wouldn't be. Even if I'd made a box for them that said "sci fi universe is copyright its owner"
The only reference to these blueprints I can find anywhere leads back to the Star Wars Technical Commentaries - either through web forums and pages that are clearly quoting from there, or direct references to this source.
So, do we have a commercially licensed product so rare its existance can be traced back to one source (who has previously said he got them in a box with loads of other stuff, acknowledging Lucasfilm IP of all things star wars) but whose artist insists was he never licensed to produce them(which would, in itself, be theft by Lucasfilm, since no matter who owns the IP on Star Wars, the artist own the IP on anything he creates unless he releases that under contract);
or do we have something he did in his spare time, with no authorisation from anyone, that just happens to have made its way into the public domain?
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