Hi and thx four feedback.
Yes the licences and rights are always very tricky, you're absolutely right. We do lot of artworks, and Anne is a painter and artist, and she repaints all artists from different pictures. Than we will cut those black & white picures out of Linoleum and create completely new pictures of our own.They will be printed like a woodcut printing, than be rescanned and coloured.
All Artists do not live anymore, this is the idea of HEROES.. and this is the only way to get "no direct problems" with the peoples rights. We already checked this out with a lawyer for Europe... We now have to check this for the rest of the world... and we will do this with a lawyer too... i would not like to have problems with the Jackson Family or so.. ;-)
We hope this will work, maybe not with all artists we planned in this deck, but hopefully with the most. It's important, that the artwork of the artistst is 100% your own Artwork and not a remake of an existing photograph... so you have to be very creative how to do this..
Cheers, Oz
In the United States, deceased people can still have "protected" images requiring a license. It falls under the purview of the person's estate. We're weird here like that - in fact, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Building itself is protected and can't be printed without a license, except under certain circumstances, like news coverage and similarly protected uses. How they enforce that, I have no idea... So I can't make a deck of cards based on Harry Houdini, Jimi Hendrix or Marilyn Monroe without obtaining permission first from their estates or working with someone who has a license for it. Certain uses would fall under "fair use," meaning it's permitted without a license, but making an item for sale with their image on it doesn't qualify as fair use unless it's done in the form of a parody.
It's one of the odd loopholes of copyright law in the US - parody is protected under the First Amendment to the US Constitution and doesn't require licensing. It's not to say that people don't seek it anyway, but it's not mandatory by law.
Don't even get me started on trademarks. Copyrights can expire, trademarks can be renewed in perpetuity - in essence, forever, if the company owning the trademark continually renews it. Copyrights themselves last far longer in the US than they ever should have been allowed to, largely due to corporate intervention. Originally, copyrights were meant to allow a creator to make some profit on an original concept, but eventually was meant to expire in order to permit the concept to become part of the public commons, for others to use and create derivative works from. Today, however, copyrights last for so long, the generation in which a concept was created is mostly dead by the time they expire, rendering the ideas so old as to be practically alien to the culture in place at that time. For example, if I created a copyrighted work today at age 48 and didn't die until age 80, that work wouldn't enter the public domain until the year 2128 - seventy years after my death. If I did it "for hire" and the copyright was owned by a company, the copyright would last for the shorter of these two terms: 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication. So that work would enter the public domain somewhere between 2111 and 2136, depending on when the company owing it got around to publishing it.
But I digress... Legally speaking, you might have certain protections in Europe, but the laws in the US are different and can affect how you're able to offer and distribute your next KS deck, if you go forward without obtaining licensing rights. Best to discuss it with an attorney that knows US copyright and trademark law before going forward - or to simply not offer it in the US.
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