Legal Question in Intellectual Property in California
T-shirts, intellectual property
If one were to create and sell a t-shirt that would attempt to alert the pubic about a certain social cause by stating a fact on it which orginated from a book or website, would one have to get permission to do so?
Example- I create a t-shirt alerting the public about AIDS. (This is just a hypothetical, ignore reaity of figures) The front of the shirt says ''Fight AIDS'', the back states that ''30 million have died already''. And, for example, the ''30 million'' fact was retrieved from a scholarly work, a United Nations website, or a newspaper article. Could I simply cite the author/org. and make the t-shirt? Must I get permission from the author/og. before doing so? Would this information AND when would this type of information be considered in the public domain or public knowledge and thereby bypassing the need for permission? Thanks so much.
1 Answer from Attorneys
Re: T-shirts, intellectual property
As they say, the devil is in the details. In your example, that would not be a problem as the stat is is not subject to copyright protection. Rather, copyright law protects the manner in which ideas are expressed, not the ideas themselves. So, if your stat was expressed in a copyrightable form that you are now putting on a t-shirt then you could have an issue. For example a slogan such as, "30 Million Dead Is 30 Million Too Many" would be copyrightable. As you can see, IP law is very fact dependent. Feel free to contact me if you want to review the specifics.
Yours truly,
Bryan
619.400.4929
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