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We are happy to bring you Toonsket.com, a website that allows you as an artist or seller of art to express yourself and help others do so through your art or intellectual property.
We allow users and partner organizations (both referred to below as owners) to upload low-resolution images of art-work (usually with a size limit of 500 KB per art-work) and make them available for others to reuse. The owner retains the copyright to all their works of art, but permit others, by sharing them, to reuse the same to create art that they share the credit with the owner for.
Toonsket is a platform for taking your collections of visual art-work to a broad audience and obtaining a stream of revenue from it. Toonsket provides you with the ability to exercise fine control over such revenue. Our intention is also to provide a very large number of people with access to art at affordable prices and to help them build personal and special consumables for special occasions.
When people want to use art in any "consumable", say in a greeting card, in order to make it personal and special, the website provides them with the tools to do so. For instance, should a user wish to create a personalized greeting card, the website provides them with the ability to select a greeting card size and shape, a background image, a border and text. It also allows a user to upload her or his own images and to weave them into the card. Finally it even allows the user to sign the card and have it shipped to the recipient at very short notice (the card ships from the recipient's home country).
Owners of art-work who desire to obtain a revenue stream from the same can do so by using one of the following market models.
When a service or product (a 'consumable') is sold that uses art created by a user or users on Toonsket other than the buyer of the consumable, a portion of the base price is distributed to all the people who contributed to creating the art. When users pay for consumables, we distribute a percentage (currently 60%) of the base price equally to all the artists whose works were used to create the consumable. For instance, when a user sends a card by email, (the base price of which is assumed to be 10 cents), a total of 6 cents is distributed among all the artists whose works were used in the card. The user who purchases the consumable and the default user 'anonymous' do not get a slice of the shared revenue since the intent of the sharing of revenue is to reward creators for sharing with others. Let us say user Sam creates a greeting card using a photograph taken by user John, a border by an anonymous user, and a picture of a balloon supplied by a user called Diana. If Sam sends the card by email, he will be billed 10 cents of which 6 cents would be shared equally between John and Diana. Should Sam choose to send the card as a hardcopy, John and Diana would share 60% the base price of 1.5 dollars, (they would get 45 cents each). If Diana's balloon is a combination of two images, one her own and the other an image belonging to Alice, then Sam would have used art from three users - John, Diana and Alice. So, the distributed portion of the base price would be shared equally between John, Diana and Alice. So, for the e-card example, they would each earn 2 cents and for the hardcopy, they would each earn 30 cents. If the number of users whose works were used is so high that each of them earns less than 1/100 of a cent, then no money is distributed. The minimum distributed quantum of money is 1/100 of a cent.
Contributors can also set an additional price upon their art-works. This is a price (of upto 100 USD) that is added over and above the base price of the consumable in which it is used, and is meant to allow artists to maintain the value/exclusiveness of a special work of art. When a work of art with an additional price is used in a consumable, the cost of the consumable would be the base price plus the additional prices. The percentage of the additional price that is paid to the creator is much higher than the share of the base price. The following sliding scale is used: for an additional price of less than 50 cents, the creator is paid 80% of the additional price, for more than 50 cents upto 5 dollars, the creator is paid 90%, and for more than 5 dollars, the creator is paid 95%. Additional prices are not shared. The owner of the artwork alone receives a share of the additional price. For example if John and Diana both set an additional price of 20 cents each on their work, the price Sam would have to pay for an emailed card would be the base price of 10 cents plus an additional price of 40 cents (20 cents for John's art and 20 cents for Diana's). John and Diana would each receive 16 cents for their art in addition to their 3 cents apiece share of the base price. If John had not set an additional price of 0 cents, then the use would pay only 20 cents above the base price and 16 cents of that would go to Diana alone. John and Diana would get 3 cents as their share of the base price in addition to the above.
The above two market models are useful for art that is intended to be used in a consumable like a t-shirt or a greeting card. Art that is intended for use in cartoons would best be sold using a pay-per-use model. In a pay-per-use model, whenever an image A is used in a new image B, the creator of the new image B pays a sum of money for the right to use image A. Again, a large percentage of the money paid by the creator of B is paid into the account of the creator of A. The creator of B agrees, when using a pay-per-use image A, that B will also be a pay-per-use. The amount paid to reuse B will include the price of image A used in B. Whenever a pay-per-use image M is used in an image N, the new image N will also become pay-per-use. For instance, if M is priced at 30 cents and N at 50 cents, then any user who wants to use N will have to pay 80 cents (50 cents for N and 30 cents for M) because N uses M. The pay-per-use model is more restrictive than the other models. Images that are shared and have already been used by other images may not add on pay-per-use images. The reason for this is that reuse of the original has already occurred and it will not be possible to charge everyone reusing it for the pay-per-use image that will be added on. These protections and restrictions will be enforced to the best of our ability but we do not guarantee that there will be no failures of the same. We assume no liability for our failure to enforce the same.
When you share a work of art on the website, you license anyone on the website to reuse it in their own artwork/consumables. You continue to receive revenue for any artwork that has been reused with an equal stake in the base price revenue from it. However the creator of the artwork retains sole copyright to the image (s)he created. As described above, any additional price you set on the art that was reused gets reflected in the derivative work as well.
You do not give up copyright to your own work but whenever your art is used in another work of art, you do not have any copyright in the derived work provided it is sufficiently different. However, you get a share of revenue from the derived work of art on Toonsket.
When your earnings exceeds 100 USD, you will be able to transfer the money in the Toonsket account to your Paypal account. You can also request a cheque in the mail.
If you have any questions, please write to me at cohan@toonsket.com, and I'll do my best to help you.