Massachusetts | Intellectual Property
Legal Question
Copyright issues with customized lamps
Our company sells customized wall lamps. These lamps have faceplate, made of paper, which has a design hand-carved into it by our artist. We are trying to determine what images we can create without violating copyright or trademark laws. We have listed these questions below.
Our Product:
- Does our light box design need to be copyrighted or patented to protect or design from competitors?
- Is it possible that other light box designers might sue us for creating a similar design?
Copyrights & trademarks:
- Can we recreate well known trademarks? For example: The Coca-Cola logo, college logos, sport teams logos, band album art.
- Can we recreate characters from movies, video games, etc? For example: Disney's Mickey Mouse, Nintendo's Mario.
- Can we recreate scenes from movies? (similar to stills on movie posters)
- Can we create derivative art from online images that are not specifically marked in the creative commons/public domain? (i.e. google images, etc)
- We will be accepting images from our clients that we will recreate on the lamps. By having the client sign a disclaimer stating that to their knowledge the image is not copyrighted, will that sufficiently protect us?
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