defunct companies are harder to deal with, the question comes who owns the rights to the logo? somebody somewhere bought out the rights or it belongs to somebody else and there is no clear chain of ownership or title transfer... so the question is do you risk putting a logo on a product that you are unsure about legally reproducing or go through legal channels to discover who owns what. huge PITA and in the end the new owners may say no anyway. that happened with Atari, which was sold and broken up over and over and over again. and now 4 companies own the original atari logo but they have subdivisions on the logo indicating, games, electronics, computers, and books. you had to figure out which one to approach for a license.
better to just remove the questionable logo and sell the item at a higher profit, less royalties
examples Tucker and Packard and Plymouth, Oldsmobile, AMC, Eagle, etc all still have logos that you technically have to secure a license to reproduce and make a profit. heck even Indian Motorcycles is still owned. Forgot about DMC also, company is making a come back in third party hands and the last 2 years really locked out people from making back to the future delorians.
Last edited by slotcardan; 08-22-2012 at 10:40 AM.
It's stupid as some would suggest, it's business and rights and royalties means money..some would also suggest that it would be adventageous to get certain bodies out there and it would help the brand....
But what it comes down to is money...if you have the money the rights would be available you to produce what you want..thats why I have a lot of respect for companies like DASH Motorsports... who spent a lot of his own money for rights so he could create the bodies that he did...
As all of you have said, licensing is a pain. Our company does uniforms and some promotional items for Rent-A-Center. Several years back (I think about '04) when Ricky Rudd was driving the #21 Wood Bros. car, Rent-A-Center did a limited 10 race associate sponsorship and a 1 race primary sponsorship of the car. We did mugs, koozies, caps and shirts as well as 1/24 and 1/64 die cast models.
The other items weren't much of an issue but my boss told me that after dealing with the reps from Ford, NASCAR, Goodyear, Wood Brothers, Ricky Rudd and the licensing company that he would rather have that colonoscopy mentioned earlier than ever do that again. We wound up not making any money at all off the die casts.
You know what?
I went out and made little "Canon" stickers and applied them to all my cars! Ha Ha!
Who's the wildman, now... Huh?
Just my way of sticking it to the man!
Licensing Issues / Questions for Specific Race Cars
Thanks for all the feedback, guys. Don't know if we are anywhere close to a solution, but great points of view. Based on what I've read here, then anyone who mass produces a specific race car (I'll use Ferrari as my example again) has had to pay a royalty to Ferrari or their agents (or maybe now Carrera, who holds licensing rights) to produce a model of one of their cars, then?
In a simple sense yes, but this is how you protect property rights. If you design a custom body shell, and it becomes popular and another person you don't know creates a mold of one of your custom bodies then replicates it with out your knowledge what do you do?
What if the reproduction body made is inferior but he produces 4 times as many as you can and he sells them cheaper your market has basically been destroyed. All that time and money you put in goes up in smoke.
Take a different angle. Somebody does the same thing but gives them away for free at huge expense. In that case you can do a cease and desist but he's not making a profit on it. At that point you could ask him to stop and cross fingers, this situation isn't likely to occur since it may cost a lot of money and time to produce.
The best fights occur when one person rips off a production product, and makes a copy then another person rips off the second person and makes a secondary reproduction, now the first guy is ****ed as the second guy for doing the same thing, and tries to sue person 2. I've been in this comical situation.
Take the decals I made as free. They are for a very small market, nobody makes them, and you need a lot of them to maintain the bodies due to extreme wear and tear.
Say you copy a matchbox car, modify the design gut it then start selling them as bodies that fit a slotcar, matchbox can sue you if you reach a level that shows up on there radar. Something like this happened in 2010 with tamiya. Tamiya had basically dropped the ball since 1979 in producing parts for the market. In 2007 people got fed up and began to make parts, dare I say better then original. The original parts commanded 1000$ of dollars the repos were very high quality and 35$ tamiya was initially happy, collectors who were serious went after the crazy original stuff, normal people were now able to maintain there collections and keep the kids in college.
Right before the tsunami hit in Japan, the reproduction market was peaking big time, suddenly tamiya flipped out and started to sue forums, message board, and reproduction sellers and even custom parts makers.
Well tamiya shot themselves in the foot. The reason they did that was because they decided there was crazy money in this reproduction trade and they wanted to stop it all so they could reproduce all the parts themselves as originals and sell them. Except no body in there right mind would trust them to supply 6 years worth of parts, so the reproduction original hit the market, and collapsed the collectors market first. High prices collapsed. Next the people that wanted other reproduction parts that tamiya decided not to produce could not get any parts, and the secondary market went bye bye overnight. Tamiya is now basically stuck with a ton of retro parts and cars that now has no market cause people are beyond ****ed.
But tamiya has control of their market share again, unless you know where to look outside of tamiya radar.
You can understand tamiya wanting to stop undercutting of thier product but at the same time tamiya didn't learn anything and just started to repeat the same mistakes with the next generation of products.
Who suffers? The fans.
If quantity is small then Ferrari or Porsche won't care.
If you made 4 widgets in ferraris name and sold them for 1 million each and people believed it was made by Ferrari you will get sued.
Now in 2009 ford went insane. They actually started a law suit that claimed any photo with the ford oval in it, ford had rights to. So if you took a picture on say Facebook of your ford mustang, ford could sue you for using there oval without permission. Amazingly somebody must of grew a brain because the suit was stopped before all the paper work was done. There was articles in various ford magazines talking about the craziness and people started a campaign putting a black box over any ford oval logo in photos. Maybe it was the public backlash that made them back down. Who knows.
There was a shake up at ford after this and top employees left the company under the guise of the auto collapse back then.
Just to note toy makers will make fake companies up have logos of the fake companies and place them on thier products just so something looks official but they don't deal with any copywrite problems. Sometimes the logos are so good people think the companies are real.
Last edited by slotcardan; 08-22-2012 at 10:12 PM.
I've heard of the Ford issue... and similar.
I know one person sued (a wealthy ****ed off guy) and said that when he paid $70K for his Shelby Mustang, I think, he bought the right to take as many pics as he wanted in a non-commercial way.
Not sure it went to court but..... things can really get out of hand.
I do love the "faux" logos on some of the cars, Dan- some are really funny.
I've heard of the Ford issue... and similar.
I know one person sued (a wealthy ****ed off guy) and said that when he paid $70K for his) Shelby Mustang, I think, he bought the right to take as many pics as he wanted in a non-commercial way.
Not sure it went to court but..... things can really get out of hand.
I do love the "faux" logos on some of the cars, Dan- some are really funny.
slotcardan, thanks for a very well thought out commentary on this subject of licensing. It is now both apparent and unfortunate for those who wish to acquire examples of specific cars that this is a many-sided issue, and one that is not easily solved to everyone's satisfaction.
It would be interesting to know how much Carrera paid to get the exclusive Ferrari rights, and whether they can share that contract with another manufacturer who produces in another scale. Maybe Steve at Racemasters can shed some light on why the Daytona Cobras produced by Tomy were called "Super Coupes", and if this is (or was) the way around the licensing at the time.
In the meantime, some of the car bodies I desire will just have to be a future (anf moving) target for now.......
well it does give more respect to the scratch builders that make a one off version.
There was a license issue with Hotwheels in 1970 there was a "Mad Maverick", and some drag team was using it, hotwheels went into production on it, then found out they had to change the name to "Mighty Maverick." they were suppose to destroy the first run, apparently 2 that are known to exist slipped out into the wild.
they are apparently priceless if you find one.
Anything having to do with Shelby is an absolute nightmare in regards to licenses. calling it a super coupe might of been a solution. i know there were a few times they released cars as clear bodies, unpainted which distanced themselves even further from a license issue, sometimes even the paint job is copyrighted.
usually with these contracts part of the deal is they can't tell anyone how much they paid.
oh well, more reason to make your own bodies and be different from the crowd.
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