1904 Allegheny Set

[Archive]

Posted By: Paul

Hal, the procedure you described of getting a trademark registered before you use the trademark has existed only since about 1990. Before that, the government would not allow you to register a trademark until you had actually used it on your product. So the Allegheny folks did not use that procedure.

As far as copyrights go, it is possible that the Allegheny company registered copyrights in these cards -- but only if they actually took the photographs themselves, or (very unlikely) if they thought the design of the card was so cool that they should protect the design with a copyright. But, until very recently, the copyright laws required the copyright owner to use the word "copyright" or the letter "c" in a circle on their cards, works of art, etc. The word "registered" just wouldn't do the trick and would result in a complete loss of all copyrights. So, I don't think the word "registered" on the cards has anything to do with copyrights.

Now, back to a discussion of vintage baseball cards ...