A note to everyone who has CafePress stores

[heidi]

If you have a CafePress store, you need to read this - and please feel free to spread the information (you can use what I wrote here, word for word) as wide as you wish, to any fandoms, although a lot of what I have to say deals specifically with WB.

Cafe Press now has a Browse By Item feature on the front page of their site. This means that their search engine now looks beyond your description of your site, to see the "names" for each of the products in your Cafe Press store.

What does this mean for those of us with HP-themed sites?

It means that while before, WB wasn't able to see if you used, say, "Draco Malfoy" or "Quidditch" in one of your product descriptions, WB wouldn't know that from the general CP search engine.

Now, however, if WB does a search for, say, QUIDDITCH, a tonne of individual items show up on the list, which might irk the people at WB whose job it is to go after trademark infringers.

It sounds, at this point, like WB is planning to give it about a month so people can remove any trademarks from their descriptions (and, of course, you shouldn't've been using anything copyrighted by WB or JKR in the first place), so this is my moment to recommend that if you have stuff in CafePress that includes things like "Quidditch" or "Hogwarts" or full character names - remove them, even if you're using them in a descriptive and not a trademark sense. First names, or last names, or words that are just words, like Accio or Lumos are fine, but if you have a product that says "SIRIUS IS NOT DEAD" and the description is "Sirius Black Did Not Die!" - my recommendation (although I'm not giving legal advice here) is to remove the word "Black" from that.

I can't be sure, though, if other media producers will have the same feeling about this sort of thing as WB does, but hopefully they will be understanding and realise that CP gave *nobody* a tonne of notice about this - they did a beta announcement about it on the GreatGear Yahoogroup two days ago, but they didn't give any warning to storekeepers at all.

Le sigh.

Now, let me just wonder - WHY did CP have to do this a month before the movie?

Comments

[kindofwhimsical.livejournal.com]

Just curious - are lawyers obligated to tell people that they are 'not giving legal advice' any time they talk about this kind of stuff? My fiance emailed his mother's boyfriend, who is a lawyer, with a legal question, and the first line of his response was: 'I am not giving you legal advice,' though he then proceeded to answer the legal question. What's the reason for this?

[nostrademons.livejournal.com]

IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer), but I believe so. I think it's a liability thing - if a lawyer gives advice, even just off the record, and the recipient later acts on that and ends up in legal trouble, the lawyer could be liable. There may be bar rules against it too. I know that law students are forbidden from giving legal advice until they pass the bar, too.

I think it applies to laypeople too, hence the IANAL above. More informed debaters on Usenet often use this when speaking about something they know nothing about, as I'm doing now. Of course, you'll still find plenty of faux legal comments on Slashdot with absolutely nothing to back them up. Bottom line, you can't practice law without a license.

[dancingrain.livejournal.com]

eek. that is good to know. thanks for the, er, uh, "not legal advice" advice.

[thoughtcr1me.livejournal.com]

:puts on lawyer hat, yay!:

Lawyers are only supposed to be giving legal advice to clients. That's so that they only give legal advice in situations where they're aware of every detail of the case they can reasonably find out from their client. In other words, no one wants lawyers to go spouting legal advice at people who have similar situations, because often small details can be crucial in the way an attorney crafts his/her advice for a specific situation.

There are also confidentiality issues involved; no lawyer worth his/her salt would ever give legal advice in a public forum like this, even if they were speaking to a client here.

And I suppose there would be a liability issue, in terms of malpractice. It would really stink, from a lawyer's perspective, to get all sorts of subpoenas from cases where people (whose situations might have been totally different) claimed that "so-and-so told me I could" and who'd then got arrested or sued.

So long story short (too late, I know) it's really a means of covering everyone's asses so that no one takes legal advice not meant for their situation and gets into trouble. ;)

[hermorrine.livejournal.com]

WHY did CP have to do this a month before the movie?

Because CP SUCKS. I will never stop being bitter.

[no-remorse.livejournal.com]

CP sucks. For more than one reason, but not telling anyone about this....

Oh, and Heidi, your new title makes FAP look all wonky in my browser.

[sff-corgi.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this, even though I don't have a store myself. I will pass it on to friede, though.

And in other news, D'Argo's FA shirt has shipped. ^_^

[gradeafan.livejournal.com]

Man...I have got to get off my ass and move on gradeafanstuff...haven't I?

I could so beat the shit out of cafepress.....

time, time, I need more time!!

g