Subject:
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Re: Use of LEGO on album cover... legal or no?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.general
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Date:
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Wed, 14 Mar 2001 14:53:51 GMT
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Viewed:
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450 times
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In article <GA2tw0.72u@lugnet.com>,
> any sort of legal disclaimer in the liner notes which clearly stated that
> My band, The Human Heads, has begun work designing a new and different album
> art concept which does not use LEGO at all. At this point we really have no
> other choice. Even if we felt that the law was clearly on our side, we do
> not have sufficient time or money to spend on court costs defending ourselves.
This seems ridiculous to me.
Did The Cars get the permission of Chrysler to use a 340 Duster on the cover
of Heartbeat City? Did Rush have to get permission from Tinkertoy to use
those on their Different Stages album cover? Did Tinkertoy come back saying,
"No, you can't do that, people might think we're selling music now."
I refuse to believe that Tinkertoy doesn't have the same trademark protection
on their little tinkertoy wheels. On the other hand, both of these are
obviously paintings, not photographs (or at least in the latter, quite
digitally enhanced if it is a photo...) so perhaps what you should do is
rebuild the wall of heads in some Lego CAD program and then it's not Lego's
stuff anymore...
The other notable difference is that the objects in question don't take up the
whole album cover... perhaps that may be the issue at hand here. While nothing
but tinkertoys and text exist on the Rush cover, the tinkertoys only run up
one side... You might find a way to do it that way. Placing actual human head
images on Lego minifigures comes to mind, perhaps something along the lines
of
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=24163
with human heads/faces substituted in for all the minifig heads... (No, I'm
not suggesting your band start looking like the Village People, though...)
This would make it fairly obvious to anyone without a law degree that you're
not associated with Lego.
Mind-boggling. But don't get me wrong; while much in this group tends to
slam Lego, I'm not. I'm slamming their lawyers. :)
-JDF
--
J.D. Forinash ,-.
foxtrot@cc.gatech.edu ( <
The more you learn, the better your luck gets. `-'
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Use of LEGO on album cover... legal or no?
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| Hi, everybody. Just wanted to fill you guys in on what has happened since I first posted. A fellow LUGNETer sent me the e-mail address of someone at LEGO who deals with these sorts of things, and with whom he had dealt successfully in the past. I (...) (24 years ago, 12-Mar-01, to lugnet.general)
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