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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 8505067" data-attributes="member: 19857">Let's not discount that early TSR was a bunch of folks who didn't really know what they were doing and so mistakes could have been made.However - while IANAL absent the artists stepping forward to claim that the art wasn't work for hire it'd be a tough case to even start to make, let alone win. Look at any of the comic book lawsuits over the years to see how tough it is to make a case - and those are cases that aren't about a design that was contracted purely as a mark for doing business under.  The Gary Freidrich Ghost Rider case is especially interesting because it's one of the ones that doesn't involve a reversion of rights claim from the Sonny Bono Act - but that involved him asserting that he brought a character to Marvel as a freelancer rather than them contracting with him to make one, and he still had multiple judgments against him before he got one enough in his favor to get Marvel to settle rather than take the risk that he was right.  Had there been less of a question of whether Marvel had contracted him to make a new character for them, he likely wouldn't have gotten to that point and gotten a settlement because it would have been clearly work for hire - the question of whether a company contracted an artist for a logo seems a bit more clearly decided (though again IANAL so I could be wrong and I'd defer to anyone in the legal profession with some intellectual property expertise on that one).That's also why LaNasa is going around asking artists to "sell" him their copyrights. So he has something to claim for ownership because the idea that because he registered the name TSR as a trademark he now owns the copyrights is transparently wrong and he needs a real stake to be able to take them to court.</blockquote>

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