Is it legal to sell brand name merchandise on website?

[breakaway]

For example, if I decided to have a webpage about spiderman, could I start selling spiderman merchandise that I have?

 

[quincy]

You can legally sell Spiderman merchandise that you legally purchased and legally own - however you should not represent yourself as a Spiderman merchandizer or you could run into trademark and copyright issues.

 

[breakaway]

hi, thanks for the reply.
But what exactly is the difference between a merchandiser and a person who sells things he owns? If I have 25 spiderman t-shirts that I want to sell, would I be considered a merchandiser?

 

[JustAPal00]

If you called your site "the comic merchandiser", or something like that, you would be OK. If you call it "The official Marvel Spiderman site" then you might be infringing on a copyright! You can sell all the Spiderman stuff you want as long as you got it legally!

 

[quincy]

breakaway -

I have noticed that you are asking a lot of questions about copyrights and trademarks. Not a problem, of course, but if you wanted to do some investigating on your own, here are a couple of websites that you might want to check out. You can go to www.copyright.gov, which is the official website for the U.S. Copyright Office - there is a lot of information there that might help you. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office site is www.uspto.gov.