A thought that popped into my head: what would the legal status of using Hypno-Tan be in any profit-driven product? Obviously, no major company is going to use her in anything, but what if an erotic game includes her in some way? Would they have to pay the person who originally created the character? Is that person still around? Would they have to pay the hub in some way since she's the mascot of it (which I can only imagine by donating to Patreon for the hub I guess)? What if they didn't include her directly but just her Jumper? The Yellow Sweater with spirals over each breast? I'm asking because unlike Zone-Tan, who is the representative of someone online, Hypno-Tan represents a community interest (aka fetish).

On that note: what about Erika? She's based on a real person, but the character is used liberally around here. Would you need to contact the real-life person she's based on? Or is there enough public use to make her "fair game" as it were? She's been in a few games, but I don't know which ones were paid for or not.

Ask changer, he uses hypno tan and erika in spiral clicker.

Good idea.

My understanding is that the first artist to draw her has copyright by default until it's assigned - I would be very unsurprised if Slayerduck or another admin had arranged for that at some point.

It makes me think some kind of "Copyright: The Internet" scheme where stuff's explicitly released to Creative Commons BY-NC-SA with limited commercial-use for smaller creators would be something very useful that I'm amazed no one at 4chan ever came up with.

Hypno-tan is kind of an amalgamation of a lot of different artists' work. She was more or less designed by the community waaaaaaaay back on Hypnochan. We've always thought of her as more or less public domain. As for Erika, since that's a real person, I would ask her before putting her into anything.