QUESTION
Is Supreme inspired Apparel copyright infringement?
Asked on Dec 17th, 2017 on Copyrights - New York
More details to this question:
Hi, We’re a company who has just started out in creating superhero themed apparel. One of our lines are inspired by the brand Supreme in that the design on the shirt is similar in font, colour etc. However, we have not explicitly used the name of the brand, “Supreme”, instead we used the word “Superman” etc. and the animated superheroes overlap on the word. Would that be a problem in terms of Copyright Infringement? If so, would we be able to change the colour of the box or some other sort of change to avoid any trouble? Any advice would be much appreciated!
1 ANSWER
Civil Rights Law Attorney serving Rockville Centre, NY
Partner at
Lori Nevias, Attorney at Law
1 Award
It's impossible to answer your question without seeing the design at issue, but it sounds like you may be violating copyright and trademark laws in various ways. When you say your apparel is "superhero themed", if you're using images of superheroes that were created by another artist, you must do the homework to determine whether the specific images you use are protected by copyrights. If you create your own images inspired by the superheroes, you will likely not be infringing on copyrights. With respect to the "Supreme-inspired" line, given that you're using the same font, color and a word that sounds like Supreme (Superman) "etc", you'd be safer if you change the font or color.
Answered on Dec 18th, 2017 at 11:49 AM