Copyright help

[ssnt1129]

What is the name of your state?West Virginia

I posted this on another forum but I found this one so I think this is the right place for this catagory.

I have been selling on e-bay for sometime now. I make magnets, lamps and other materal out of licensed carebear material. Ebay or (VERO) has pulled my auctions. I have e-mail the company "American Greetings" asking them why my auctions were pulled. No reply yet. The e-mail states copyright, trandemark infrindgements.

I have in no way stated that these are genuine Carebear products. All my products say that they are hand made and also state what they are made out of.

Could some one tell me how I can fight this or is there a loaw that prohibits making handmade items from manufactured material?

 

[divgradcurl]

What is the name of your state?West Virginia

I posted this on another forum but I found this one so I think this is the right place for this catagory.

I have been selling on e-bay for sometime now. I make magnets, lamps and other materal out of licensed carebear material. Ebay or (VERO) has pulled my auctions. I have e-mail the company "American Greetings" asking them why my auctions were pulled. No reply yet. The e-mail states copyright, trandemark infrindgements.

I have in no way stated that these are genuine Carebear products. All my products say that they are hand made and also state what they are made out of.

Could some one tell me how I can fight this or is there a loaw that prohibits making handmade items from manufactured material?

Well, a couple of things. First, nobody can stop you from creating and selling objects that make use of trademarked or copyrighted materials that you have purchased -- so if you buy Carebear pictures, for example, and laminate them onto a piece of wood, you can sell that product, as long as each picture you used was lawfully purchased at retail.

However, what you can't them do is advertise it as a "Carebear plaque," or used the trademarked name in any way that suggests that you might be selling something that is affiliated with or otherwise authorized by the trademark holder. So, if you use the word "Carebear" in your title, that might be sufficient to get you into trouble. You can use a trademark in a purely descriptive sense -- like advertising a "Carebear picture mounted on a plaque" or something like that, but you have to be very careful to only use the trademark in such a way that it exactly described the trademarked item you are selling, and no more.

Finally, though, eBay doesn't have to let you, or anyone else, sell anything at all -- they are a private company -- so if they pull your products, you really have limited recourse. So even though you might be doing something legal, eBay still might not let you put the ads back up. That's just reality.

Try and reword your ads, especially the titles, to ensure that any use of the Carebear trademark is used only in a purely descriptive manner, and see if that works.

 

[ssnt1129]

Thank you

Thank you for the information. Is there something in writing or some kind of law that states that you can use this material on items that are handmade? I would like to have this information so that I can have it in case I would get suspended from selling from ebay.

I have sent numerous e-mails to American Greetings (the ones that pulled my auction) and as of the moment I have heard nothing back from them.

 

[divgradcurl]

Thank you for the information. Is there something in writing or some kind of law that states that you can use this material on items that are handmade? I would like to have this information so that I can have it in case I would get suspended from selling from ebay.

Well, the statutes really say nothing much about this at all -- the law you are looking for is buried in caselaw. Here's a link that provides some more discussion about trademark law, but is not "law" that you ca cite to eBay or anyone else: http://www.iusmentis.com/trademarks/crashcourse/limitations/

Here's some more information: http://gindylaw.com/publications/alterationissue.html