Anime artist accuses Sony of selling her art on PS4 without permission

A popular Czech anime artist, who goes by the online name ‘liah0227’, has claimed that Sony are selling their artwork without permission on PS4, where it is listed as being owned by a different company. 

In a March 14 tweet, Liah claimed that PlayStation creators Sony are selling a piece of her art on the Playstation Store, without her consent or permission.

The product itself is instead credited to Kingdom Media LLC, who Liah explains she has had no contact with, nor Sony.

The listing is on the PlayStation Store under the name ‘Anime School Girl Avatar’, and is being sold for $0.99. 

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“So Sony is selling my art on their playstation store and has it owned by Kingdom Media LLC?” she said. “I was never reached out regarding this by Sony or Kingdom Media LLC.” 

She also explained that it was actually one of her followers that made her aware of the incident, rather than any of the companies involved approaching her for permission. 

In a series of follow up tweets, the artist explained that she has since reached out to Sony in order to solve the situation. However, the company has since stopped replying. 

“I already contacted Sony to resolve this on good terms,” she said, “keeping a good intention in my mind but after some emails back and forth they didn’t help me and stopped replying to me. I’m hoping I can bring some attention this way and they can take down the art from their store.”

She continued: “I don’t think I can sue them, I understood that I needed to have my art registered for copyright in order to take this to court which is not the case.” 

She concluded by explaining that she never even considered copyrighting her work, as she never thought her work would be taken without permission. Regardless, it remains her intellectual property, meaning she likely has a legal claim over its commercial use.

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There has been no public response from Sony, with the communication between the company and Liah not available. Her original tweet has received a huge amount of attention, sitting at over 1,800 retweets at the time of writing, helping spread the word.