Plenty of artists do comission of copyrighted characters.
On deviant art, you can ask any comic artist to do any comission, I guess as long as they don't make a living of exclusively drawing characters that are not theirs it's OK.
As far as I know you can do it, but you can't mass produce it. That is to say, you could draw all the copyrighted characters you want, but not for a comic, not for a poster to be sold, tea cozies, etc...
I assume this is the sort of thing that protects artists at comic conventions who sell their on the spot work of copyrighted characters even if they have already drawn them for the various companies, and gotten paid a one time fee...
Go to a comic or sci-fi convention every artist who has a table (and even some who don't) will be doing art of batman and spider-man, statesman, and anyone else who they get paid for. very rarely do the artists draw their own characters at conventions.
Now if they were to draw a batman picture and mass produce it as posters to sell it might be something different
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That and aren't our CoX characters technically copyrighted to NCsoft so if it were a problem commissioning other characters from Marvel, DC, Image, Dark Horse, etc. even our characters would fall under that issue?
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While I'm NOT a copyright lawyer, I DO know for a fact that many artists do paid commissions of copyrighted characters with no problems. Even some really big name artists (Like Bob Layton and Frank Brunner to name a couple) do it. Its most likely going to be fine as long as they don't (as has been stated by others) sell posters, t-shirts, comics, - that sort of stuff.
OK thanks everyone! I was just worried I might get myself or an artist in trouble with my next commission.
Yeah 'technically' artists can't do our CoH characters as we don't own the IP to them, but as long as you don't discuss money on the boards, or you say you're paying for the 'time' not the art, then it's okay. And yeah as long as you don't put the image on a t-shirt and sell it at cafepress or something you're fine.
The lawyers are pretty cool with it, as it's almost like free publicity :P
Actually.... I believe that we as players own the IP of the character concept...
.. but not their powersets or costumes. Also, as long as they're within the game milieu, NCSoft assumes to hold the trademark as a game-generated character (unless we remove them from the servers prior to striking out on our own.)
Now, I am NOT a lawyer, and my understanding of this could be wrong.
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The idea that deleting the character removes the rights to it form NC has always seemed a bit dubious to me. At the least backups are maintained even of characters that are deleted for some time.
But I don't think there's ever been, or ever will be, an instance of NC suing someone over a character. I'd be shocked if there were.
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Well consider that people will create characters based on IP they developed BEFORE they ever set foot in the costume creator.
Does using the tools NCSoft put in the game transfer that IP to NCSoft? Or is that 'copyright infringement' even though it's the player's personal intellectual property?
Plus there's artwork, stories, history... all of that surely can't be NCSoft's property cos you used a game to 'prototype' the character, can it?
There IS precedent for that, though. If I write a story while using my work laptop, on my work network, sitting at my desk at work, TECHNICALLY it's created using my company's 'resources' and therefore they can lay claim to it. That's happened for inventions and other ideas before, quite a few times.
Not that they'd want it... unless of course, I made lots of money with it. THEN they'd want to cash in.
"City of Heroes. April 27, 2004 - August 31, 2012. Obliterated not with a weapon of mass destruction, not by an all-powerful supervillain... but by a cold-hearted and cowardly corporate suck-up."
Yeah. Rowr did not come to pass until I came to CoH so I can't claim prior art on her whatsoever. Even though I came up with the story and background and such, I could keep that.
It's all wishy washy and I don't think I"m ever going to take Rowr and sell her to Disney so they can make a movie out of her 
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As far as I know you can do it, but you can't mass produce it. That is to say, you could draw all the copyrighted characters you want, but not for a comic, not for a poster to be sold, tea cozies, etc...
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My wife and I recently got sucked right into art collecting, mostly getting work done of our CoX characters. What I'm wondering is, what are the legal issues around commissioning an artist to portray someone else's copyrighted character? As in I want artist X to draw Batman or Wolverine or Lord Recluse... Would this be breaking copyright laws or is there a legal loophole?