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Pastimes : Investment Chat Board Lawsuits -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: CFA who wrote (4860)	7/2/2003 10:16:03 PM
From: Jeffrey S. Mitchell	Respond to of 12465

Egotard, I think with multi-personality playing cards you can make an argument that the cards themselves, since they are "regulation", are what you are selling and the pictures are a humorous parody. If the cards were, for example, different poses of Martha Stewart, I would think that would be different because then you could make a case that she was the main attraction. However, I would also think the more satirical you were, the less case could be made you were capitalizing on the "good name" of Martha Stewart, and thus the less chance you'd be in violation of any right of publicity laws. I would think the same argument above, for the most part, could be made with a t-shirt since, again, a case could be made the shirt itself was the main attraction. Again, the more the focus is on a single person's likeness, the more in danger you are of violating someone's right of publicity. Once you get to a the level of a painting, it's hard to make an argument you are buying it for the frame or the nice color scheme. As we saw with the recent Tiger Woods case, the artist was able to claim he was honoring various winners of the Masters. Had the piece just been a tribute to Tiger Woods, I would think the court would have ruled differently. If any of the images used were copyrighted, that's a whole other ball of wax. Usual disclaimer: I'm not an attorney so treat everything above as sheer speculation. - Jeff