Hello In Stitches Family!
We are knee-deep in the Stock Show and enjoying every minute of it! How about you? Do you have your tickets?
As we’ve been embroidering a lot of jackets and hats, we started thinking about copyright laws. Thinking about copyright laws may just be something that people in our industry do, but the reason we do it is that people have lost a lot of money by infringing copyright laws.
We know someone in our industry who started selling items with a certain little cat who says hi a lot (you know who we’re talking about). They didn’t think it was a big deal, but it ended up costing them $35,000.
I don’t know about you, but we do not have $35,000 laying around. So, we are VERY careful with copyright laws.
We love a good football game, but we cannot print our favorite team’s logo without their permission (which they sell so we won’t be doing that soon).
The Happiest Place on Earth is a fun place, but we cannot use anything with a mouse on it (or any of the other characters).
When a company copyrights an image, it means they own it and they can sue you and us for using it.
We even go so far as to get permission from you when we use your logo.
Let’s take a look at a few examples:
When you have a logo created by us or others, you need to make sure you have permission to use all parts of that logo for anything you want to use it for.
Even when someone is a sponsor for an event, we still need permission to use their logo.
These logos are literally ¼” tall, but we still had to have permission to use them. (We use a special digital process to get such a clear image.)
So, what does this all come down to? If you don’t have permission to use an image or logo, we can’t use it. It protects all of us from HUGE issues!
If you’d like to read more about copyright, you can go here.
Thank you for reading all about why we’re such sticklers when it comes to copyrighted material! I know that you think of it as a “cease and desist” letter kind of thing but they don’t always start that way. Sometimes, they go for the jugular!
If you have something in mind, let us know. We can give you suggestions of ways to get what you want without infringing on copyright laws!