General Category > Comic Related Discussion
A Comic Team Using Public Domain and Original Heroes
narfstar:
AC Comics has trademarked Miss Victory so you would not want to use her on your covers either
TheCosmicMoth:
--- Quote from: narfstar on November 20, 2015, 09:14:34 AM ---AC Comics has trademarked Miss Victory so you would not want to use her on your covers either
--- End quote ---
Dammit, Bill Black!
narfstar:
It probably would not hold up legally because trademark can not be revived and it had lapsed. I have been a big supported of Femforce since its insception. Since Miss Victory is a mainstay of Femforce I would respect his use. He also got the rights to all the Fiction House characters including Sheena. This again may not matter since they had already lapsed.
John C:
Don't forget, there are two kinds of trademark. Federal trademarks need to be filed and maintained, yes, but common law trademarks are just a matter of the company being associated with the term.
A good example might be (I don't care enough to look up if it's registered...) a name like Peter Parker. It's never the title of a book. It's probably not distinct enough to register. But publishing The Secret Life of Peter Parker would give Marvel/Disney a solid argument that the publisher is trading on their brand, and that a horrible product would unfairly reflect poorly on them.
That said, I doubt companies like AC or Dynamite would have much of a leg to stand on in common law terms. It would be really hard to make the argument that a small press using old characters that come from other companies would have any kind of exclusive claim on the names without a history of actively building the brand. A Mage or Grendel, maybe, but not a name with the almost complete lack of recognition of Miss Victory.
TheCosmicMoth:
A sketch of the first three characters I want to focus on: Beetle, Patch, and Moth.
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b371/Jekylhyde14/SquadGoals1_zps5qdfpdwm.jpg
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