Copyright question

[Kamiccolo]

Myself and a group of other people have created an online card game based off the Dragon Ball Z Collectable Card Game created by Score Entertainment. Score's game ended a few years ago, and because we enjoyed playing it we decided to try and keep it going online. We have been holding tournaments of their game online for awhile but with no new cards it has been getting boring. So we decided to create a brand new game, based off their old game.

This new dbz card game is only available online and is free for anyone to play. We hold tournaments every month and will normally try to find some kind of prize that doesn't cost us anything. Normally this will just be allowing the winner of the tournament to create their own card to be added to the game, but occasionally the site earns enough money through ads that we're able to use that as a prize.

Everyone who plays the new game is really enjoying it, and a lot of them have commented that if this were a real game they would like to buy the cards so they could play it in real life, instead of just on the computer. Because of this we're considering printing the cards and selling them on our site / Ebay. But we think that we could get into legal problems if we started to make money from this, even if all the money that we make from selling cards is used as prizes for the tournaments.

Score Entertainment has been closed down, so we don't think that making something based off their old game will get us into trouble. We even have some of their ex employees on our site. But the character names are trademarks of TOEI Animation, and all the cards have images from the dbz episodes which are liscensed by Funimation Productions.

Would we be able to sell these cards? If not then what kind of legal trouble could we be in if we did sell them?

Thanks

 

[divgradcurl]

Score Entertainment has been closed down, so we don't think that making something based off their old game will get us into trouble. We even have some of their ex employees on our site. But the character names are trademarks of TOEI Animation, and all the cards have images from the dbz episodes which are liscensed by Funimation Productions.

Would we be able to sell these cards? If not then what kind of legal trouble could we be in if we did sell them?

Thanks

Just because the original owner has closed down or stopped producing new products doesn't mean that the works become public domain, as your own post indicates. If you want to do this without subjecting yourself to legal liability, you need to find out who the rights holders are for the various trademarks you intend to use (the character names, and anything else that might be trademarked) and who owns the copyrights (and perhaps trademarks) to the images you intend to use, and seek permission from them.