psychotick
Auror
Hi,
Thought I'd share with you my misadventures of the last two days. Partly as a lesson of what not to do, partly as a question of how many of you even think about this subject.
So the guts of it is that yesterday morning, after a very long night going through the second external edit of my book, I pronounced it done and pubbed it on Kindle and Smashwords. And then at about eight o'clock in the morning I went to sleep - happy. At ten thirty I woke up in a sweat and suddenly realised that there might be a problem. My new book was called "Alien". And though it has absolutely nothing to do with space monsters, and you can't copyright titles, I realised the title could be trademarked.
So after hours, literally hours, of wading through the site for patents and trademarks, I found it, and sure enough "Alien" is trademarked by a certain studio for among other things, fictional novels. Bugger! (By the way if you do a search of the website of the office on "Alien" you get over seven hundred and fifty hits.)
Now did this mean the book was in danger of being considered in violation of a trademark? I on't know. But on the possibility that it might be, new titles, new covers and new texts were readied and uploaded, and to cut a long story short, (or make a short snappy story title long), Alien Caller was born.
Ok, so maybe I was stupid. It is after all a big franchise. And in fairness I wasn't the only one. During my search of kindle etc, I found two other novels called "Alien" as well as the Alan Dean Foster one. Don't know if they are older than 1976 and so exempt, or else no one really cares. But it did occur to me that as I went through this process that I'd never thought to check on the titles of any of my other books. An I know that there are other books out there with the same titles. There are three Mavericks for example, and I suppose any one of the other authors could have trademarked them.
So my questions for you guys, are how many of you actually check these things? Anyone know how much trouble I could have actually been in? Or is it permissable to publish a completely unrelated work with the same title?
Cheers, Greg.
Thought I'd share with you my misadventures of the last two days. Partly as a lesson of what not to do, partly as a question of how many of you even think about this subject.
So the guts of it is that yesterday morning, after a very long night going through the second external edit of my book, I pronounced it done and pubbed it on Kindle and Smashwords. And then at about eight o'clock in the morning I went to sleep - happy. At ten thirty I woke up in a sweat and suddenly realised that there might be a problem. My new book was called "Alien". And though it has absolutely nothing to do with space monsters, and you can't copyright titles, I realised the title could be trademarked.
So after hours, literally hours, of wading through the site for patents and trademarks, I found it, and sure enough "Alien" is trademarked by a certain studio for among other things, fictional novels. Bugger! (By the way if you do a search of the website of the office on "Alien" you get over seven hundred and fifty hits.)
Now did this mean the book was in danger of being considered in violation of a trademark? I on't know. But on the possibility that it might be, new titles, new covers and new texts were readied and uploaded, and to cut a long story short, (or make a short snappy story title long), Alien Caller was born.
Ok, so maybe I was stupid. It is after all a big franchise. And in fairness I wasn't the only one. During my search of kindle etc, I found two other novels called "Alien" as well as the Alan Dean Foster one. Don't know if they are older than 1976 and so exempt, or else no one really cares. But it did occur to me that as I went through this process that I'd never thought to check on the titles of any of my other books. An I know that there are other books out there with the same titles. There are three Mavericks for example, and I suppose any one of the other authors could have trademarked them.
So my questions for you guys, are how many of you actually check these things? Anyone know how much trouble I could have actually been in? Or is it permissable to publish a completely unrelated work with the same title?
Cheers, Greg.