A fan-work guideline names no exception for a graduated character

The setup

hololivepro.com, COVER Corporation's official site for its hololive and HOLOSTARS brands, publishes a single Derivative Works Guidelines document covering fan art, cover songs, clips, cosplay, fan-hosted events and fan-support advertising built on its content. As retrieved on 16 September 2026, the page's music appendix carries a footer note that it was last updated on 31 August 2026, showing the document is actively maintained rather than a fixed, one-time notice. The guidelines are also linked from the company's own FAQ, which points fans to them for questions about clips, fan art and fan-run advertising alike.

What the documents show

The guidelines define what counts as a derivative work, set requests and restrictions such as no business use, no misrepresentation as official, and no content damaging to talent or company reputation, and state that COVER 'will not exercise' its rights against compliant fan work. They cover digital games, clips, cosplay, overseas activity and music each as their own numbered section. Read end to end, the document contains no clause naming graduation, retirement, or a talent's departure, and no separate rule set keyed to a character's employment status. The FAQ, in a different section entirely, notes only that the company cannot deliver fan letters to talent who have graduated or left, an operational point about mail, not about intellectual property.

The craft

For a fan creator, this means the same rulebook that governs a cover song of an active talent's music also governs one built on a graduated character's, because the guidelines are written around the content and the brand rather than around whether the original performer is still active. A creator planning a fan project tied to an older or discontinued character has no separate clause to check; the general restrictions on commercial use, third-party rights and reputational harm apply exactly as they would to any current release.

Keeping the creator in control

This is an editorial reading: COVER keeps the same copyright and enforcement rights over derivative works regardless of a talent's current status, since the guidelines state the company does not relinquish its rights through them. That protects the company's IP consistently across its whole catalogue, but it also means a fan community built around a graduated character gets no published assurance, one way or the other, that COVER's approach to their fan works will not change later; by the guidelines' own terms, they are subject to change without notice.

• Does a company's fan-content policy say anything different for characters whose performer has left, or is one rulebook applied throughout?
• If a guideline can change without notice, how would a fan community following it learn that it had?
• Who retains enforcement rights over a graduated character's music, art and clips, and does that change after departure?

What the guidelines document, narrowly, is continuity of policy rather than a gap: COVER's published rules for fan-made work do not carve out an exception once a character's chapter closes, which is itself the notable, checkable fact.