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Looking for some copyright advice please
I made two signs last week for a customer who sent artwork, although it was a jpeg he sent me, I know the guy and rather than explain that wasn’t the file type I required and waste time, I quicklynredrew it in Corel, his business name, some circles and an excavator clip art that shows up on first line of google image search!
Five minute job if lucky,
Tonight I get a message from a guy who claims his son designed that logo and was shocked when he saw it on signs as my customer hadn’t paid for the copyright.
It got me thinking,
Is it my place to check the customer owns the artwork, that would take up a huge amount of time,And also what can actually be copyrighted?
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6 Replies
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How did he know "you" created the signs?
Has he contacted your customer?
Do you have the .jpg your customer gave you for proof?unless it it blatantly obvious something belongs to someone else like Coca-Cola, Disney characters etc it would be very difficult to try and validate ownership of every bit of artwork provided to you.
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I like to,post pics of my work on Facebook!! And the customer shared it,
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if the guy complaining is 100% correct, all you can do is apologise but provide the artwork gave to you by your customer.
or, contact your customer with this guys details asking him to take things up from here as you produced the artwork in good faith that he belonged to it.
i would also apologise and outline it was given to you and you had no idea it was not his. then leave it between them to sort out. make sure you do it by email and document contact with both customer and person complaining. -
Thanks rob I already done so by message, but will get email details to,
In your business do You ever check or is it really not the signamkers place
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unless blatantly obvious, we do not check because to be honest, where would you start and how long do you dedicate to doing it???
if it is obvious then we advise we cant for legal reasons and suggest alternatives to whatever they are wanting to use.
the problem with joe bloggs being the originator of a bit of artwork is them proving it and the lengthy process it would take unless a fully protected copyright bit of material. i bet every person reading this post has had their artwork duplicated or ripped off at some point by the local cowboy. all you can do is try and limit it happening again and learn from it.
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Hi
whats the copyright status on the excavator clip art if its on google if the original designer had just used clipart available on google and added some circle elements etc its not really is designKev
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