[Francis K]

Hello everyone, been a long time since I've posted on here but I would sincerely appreciate some help!

Due to a sudden death in my family recently I've been asked to take over a very successful ebay store. I was asked to take over because I also sell online, although I sell through my wholesaling business but I used to do shirts myself although just simple heat transfers. It's a really messed up situation but I want to help and need to help.

Regardless, it appears my cousin was extremely successful but I'm not sure if what he was doing is legal, for the time being I've removed all of his listings. In addition to random images such as flags/animals he was also selling musician photos, album covers, professional sports athletes and things of that nature. He was printing them on posters, tshirts and 8x10's, he's been doing this for a couple years now and has a very long list of names he called "restricted". So I'm assuming he did all of this by trial and error, he figured out which items the rights owners didn't care about and which would be removed. My cousin was the breadwinner in his family and my aunt was more than disappointing when I simply shut everything down. I know he was doing well but I assume ebay would eventually catch up with him and I'm not in the business of infringing on copyrights.

Basically what I want to ask is what images are okay to relist and which should I delete for good? Can I really sell, for example, pictures of professional sports stars and musicians? I don't want to simply sell off all of his equipment and shut everything down, I'm willing to put work into it but I want to do it the right way.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Thank you in advance,
Francis K

 

[ryan barker]

i hate to say it, but it definitely sounds as if your cousin was infringing on copyrights all over the place. names and pics of musicians and athletes are protected under one or more of several laws including copyright, rights of publicity and trademarks. not only can the person take action, an organization such as the NFL can sue. they can send you a cease and desist ordering you to stop, but they don't have to.

basically, everything listed as 'restricted' is probably IP infringement, or at least should be looked at carefully. i doubt the celebs or the organizations don't care about pursuing protecting their IP property, it's more likely they just haven't gotten around to it or know about it yet.

as disappointed as your aunt is likely to be, imagine how disappointed she'd be if she got sued by one or more of the infringed people/org's.

doing this thing right will probably entail you scrapping what's likely to be your deceased cousin's best selling designs, sorry to say. and it doesn't matter if he created new designs or not, it's still infringement.

do a little research on copyright infringement and fair use. sorry, i'd provide links, but i'm real pressed for time.

good luck, hope it works out for you.

 

[charles95405]

To be REALLY sure..take some of the images to an IP Attorney...don't rely too much on any public forum...yes even this one....for any type of legal advice, Ryan's advice is pretty sound. But do consult any attorney

 

[selanac]

The flags and animals should be fine.

Are you sure he doesn't have a file somewhere with written permission to print? He may have been sending royalties to these people.

We shouldn't assume since he's been posting on eBay that he was screen printing them illegally.

 

[ryan barker]

it sounds as if that would be a lot of licenses. too, if someone had that much invested in it, certainly they'd keep a hard copy around and the family would likely have known about the licenses, no?

to clarify what i'd written in a rush, obviously your own designs are your own to use however you want as long as they don't contain any musicians/athletes/team/band names who permission you don't have to use. if i wanted to make cool led zeppelin shirts with my own design and font, it doesn't matter, it's still infringement. i think this is where a lot of folk that they can get away with it, by doing a redesign and think that's derivative, transformative or somehow otherwise some other obscure form of fair use.

hard to say whether or not those hypothetical contracts are even transferable, too. if they were done in your cousin's name, you probably would need them renewed. if a business name, i'm not quite sure how that would work, either.

if you can't locate any contracts, see if you can obtain bank statements, credit card or check statements showing payments to an organization or possible licensing agency (not sure if these things exist, just look for a name that may indicate payment to a person/company/lawyer that seems as if it may fit the bill). and you may want to make sure everything else he did had was legit, too, so look for evidence of payments to a place selling stock photos. on the surface it appears that he took the low road when it came to using sport/music designs/names, so if that bears out to be true, everything else is suspect, also, and you should do some due diligence to make sure that's cool to use.

i wouldn't assume that just because he kept selling the designs for years that everything was okay legally. thousands of people make bootlegs and rips and re-designs all the time. it could also be that there's a pile of cease and desists laying around over specific images that he removed and just kept rolling along with the rest of them.

you did the right thing by suspending sales of those things. barring any evidence pro or con, you have to assume those are IP infringements on the obvious stuff. without seeing the designs on the other stuff, you might be okay, but it's impossible to say where he may have copy/pasted an element here and there. it's unreasonable to search 10,000 pages to look for a lion head, for example, but i don't care who the person is, everyone has their own design characteristics and artistic ability, so i'd look for consistency. do the designs appear to be made by one person, or are they just all over the place? i would image that there would be some design traces left on a computer serving as clues.

the family put you in a tough spot. okay, so you're not exactly michael corleone reluctantly taking over the 'family business' here, but it still boils down to a moral and ethical dilemma. some are going to see it in terms of black and white, others will find the gray area and begin a process of justifications, the 'i have a family to attend to in their hour of crisis, so i'm going to run with things the way they are and gradually change things to make it completely jake' style of reasoning. it would be a tough call for a lot of people. not sure what i'd do....

 

[selanac]

I agree with Ryan in that you did the right thing. Hopefully your Aunt will see the light, and figure you or better yet ask for forgiveness herself.

There is a Licensing show every year. It use to be in NY every year, and they decided to move the show throughout the USA. Don't know where it's going to be this coming year.

My point is, maybe your cousin went, and purchased some type of License. As Ryan said, I'd quit until you can prove it.