Post #392291 by Chip and Andy on Mon, Jul 7, 2008 8:25 PM

On 2008-07-07 18:12, bananabobs wrote:

Okay, let's get to the bottom of this, here and now, where is the line? Is there a line? Grey area or sharp line? Who gets to decide? What is the high road and what is law?

Intellectual Property is an animal all to itself with its own kind of Lawyer.

Trademark is something completely different, and again has its own kind of Lawyer.

Copyright is easier to manage because it has been around the longest, has the most clearly (hah!) defined parameters, and has had many court-tested cases to have a legal precedent to draw upon.

Start here

http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/

for the basics.

To apply it to Tiki as a concept.....

the Heitiki image is old enough, and far enough back in history as to be fair game to reproduce. If you want to carve a Heitiki no one can come after you and claim you copied them. No one 'owns' the Heitiki image any longer. (Cultural ownership is a different conversation)

However, if you take my Heitiki carving, create a mold of it and start selling duplicates of it, that is not cool. And if I can prove that they are copies of my carving I can sue for lost revenue.

Does that help?