[Archive]

Posted By: davidcycleback

The way people will get into trouble reproducing Yankees symbols or Mickey Mantle portraits is when they are directly profiting from the reproductions of copyrighted or trade marked stuff. If you sell unauthorized Yankees T-shirts, Brett Favre jackets or Natalie Portman coffee mugs online, you could hear from someone's lawyer. You're illegally making a profit off of someone else's image and name.

If you put a picture of Natalie Portman on your non-commercial baseball card history website because you think she's cute, I doubt anyone will care. Probable worst case scenario would be someone will ask you to remove the picture. It's improbable someone would sue you over it if you promptly remove the image, as you aren't using the image to make money. I'm not saying you have a right to put that Natalie Portman image on your the site, but that, real world-wise, it's improbable you would be sued over it.

I think one could report the mentioned yearbooks to eBay as a rights infringement for and see what eBay does. eBay might surprise you and pull them. As mentioned before, a new way concerned eBayers could try and deal with unauthorized reprints on eBay is reporting them as rights infringements. The yearbook reprint I saw was a Yankees yearbook with the big Yankees logo on front. You or I, or presumably the seller (I'm assuming he's not Hank Steinbrenner), can't make and sell commercial products with the Yankees logo on front without the Yankees' permission. This is similar to the unauthorized Yankees T-shirts and Favre jackets I mentioned.