Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming JUNE 2015 36 Legal Matters Just because a picture is on the Internet does not mean it is there properly and with the permission of the photographer. Furthermore, even if the photographer granted permission for the website to use the image, that does not mean he intended for you to use it as well. foremost, you should work vigilantly to protect your company’s own marks. Brands, and the marks that identify them, are valuable business assets. When someone else appropriates your marks and places them on products or uses them to promote services that are not related to your company, the meaning, efficacy and value of your trademarks are at risk. In fact, your entire brand identity could be at risk. For the same reasons, you also must work vigilantly to avoid infringing trademarks that belong to others. Your marks should be the unique, identifiable signifier of your business. Not only do you not want consumers to confuse your brand with another, you also do not want to end up in an infringement lawsuit in federal court. Every time you develop new trademarks to use in conjunction with your latest promotion, or a new retail outlet or restaurant, you must conduct a thorough search to make sure your new marks truly are new, and truly are yours If someone else used the same or a similar mark in commerce first, it could be theirs. Prize giveaways also create the possibility for trademark troubles. Just as you should protect your marks, the manufacturers and creators of the prizes you give away protect their marks, as well. Sometimes they have very strict guidelines as to whether and how their marks may be used. Before you create direct mail, posters and other communication pieces featuring someone else’s trademarks, be sure you are following their requirements to the letter. Otherwise, you could end up reproducing all of your collateral—or losing your promotion entirely. What about agency work? Do we own that? Maybe. What does your contract with the agency say? Unless you specifically negotiated with the agency that the creative they produce would be “works for hire,” the agency owns the work. Never assume that just because it’s your ad, it’s your ad. Double-check the language of your agency contracts. And, if you foresee the need in the future to use, modify or reproduce agency work on your own, be sure you work out that detail with the agency before you renew. Most agencies are, generally, open to negotiating a work-for-hire arrangement. But unless you negotiate it, the creative likely belongs to the folks who created it. How about pictures on the Internet with no indication? Can I just take the photo and credit the source where I found the picture? No way. Just because a picture is on the Internet does not mean it is there properly and with the permission of the photographer. Furthermore, even if the photographer granted permission for the website to use the image, that does not mean he intended for you to use it as well. And, if there are people in the photo, you could wind up reproducing their images without their permission—which presents another (but related) set of problems altogether. If you are interested in using photos that are available online and for free, a great place to start is Creative Commons. Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that makes hundreds of millions of creative works of all types available to the public for free, whether via the public domain or pursuant to specialized licenses with its many content contributors. What if we saw something somewhere and liked it… could we change some things and use it ourselves? Probably not. If the work you liked is subject to copyright, and you simply “change some things” about it, you may have created a derivative work. Derivative works are works that transform, adapt or somehow rework the original work’s creative expression.