QUESTION
Would generating ad revenue from an original book written by myself with trademarked characters in it infringe on the original creators'' IP rights?
Asked on Aug 11th, 2011 on Intellectual Property - North Carolina
More details to this question:
I''ve just finished creating a table-top role-playing game that I''ve been working on for about a year, but it makes reference to the titles of some old songs and names of classical video game characters because it is based on retro video-gaming nerds. For example, a song title is used as the name of a power and the name of a video game character is used as a character trait. I had no intention of selling this, but had intended to post a link to download it on adf.ly so my fellow gamers could download it for free and I''d receive payment every time they visited the link. I''m unsure of whether this would be infringing on the original creators'' of said song titles and video game characters intellectual property rights, and wanted to figure everything out beforehand so I don''t get into any legal trouble.
1 ANSWER
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Song titles are not copyrightable and are not subject to the law of trademark. Characters from a video game may be protected under the law of trademark. It is possible that the use of the names of the characters is permissible under trademark laws, if the use is a non-trademark use by you. This is a concept called "fair use" in a trademark sense. Without more information, it cannot be determined what rights the character creator may have and how you are using them.
Answered on Aug 19th, 2011 at 11:15 PM