Fan art

[galerion]

The way I see your problem there Arty is that your using ebay and esty, I think if your going to sell that kind of item and have a good size product rage then you would be better off creating a dedicated website for that purpose. Then its a case of designing and marketing that site to customers who are likely to buy that kind of product. In this case you have 1 problem to solve "driving traffic to your site" instead of multiple problems naming products on a sites where there are millions of products and your customers are searching by keywords.

[ArtyGamer]

You're dead right. My website was launched before any other outlets were considered and it was there that they first pulled my products (not Take Two, another company) but the problem is that even though the website doesn't seem to be targetted by them, I can't actually advertise in the places I want to.. because those places are also frequented by game developers as well as gamers themselves. I have a gaming website myself, with around 200,000 unique visitors per month but advertising it on that site would be a death sentence - I have the captive audience, but that audience also has PRs, publishers, and developers from the industry. It's catch 22 really.

I advertised the merchandise website on the gaming website ONCE and within 72 hours I had over fifty products pulled even though the product names didn't include any trademarks. It was purely the weight of their legal power, knowing that I couldn't afford to go head to head with them to dispute their claims of trademark infringement. If you're familiar with the gaming industry, there's a guy called Tim Langdell who used to run a games company in 1990 called "Edge Games". They didn't do very well, and he lost a lot of money and pretty much vanished from the scene... until he popped up a few years ago defending his trademark of "edge". Yup. He owned the word mark for "edge" and it wasn't even a logo... just the word. So he tried to sue Edge Magazine, EA Games (for the Mirror's Edge game) and anyone else who used the word "edge" within the gaming industry, claiming that they owed him a licensing fee to use it. Naturally, the big guys all spent millions fighting him in court and it was thrown out but the smaller guys with no legal heft all backed down and renamed their websites/games/magazines because they couldn't afford the legal battle. That's pretty much where I am. I know that I'm legally allowed to use all of my designs, and I KNOW that by having them on my own website they can't actually stop me as long as I don't mention their IP by name, but when their thirty-strong legal team in NY or NJ come at me the best I can do is reply with "I'm not actually doing anything wrong" but it falls upon deaf ears because they know that I can't stand up against them financially.

I understand why they do it. They don't want their brand being misrepresented; there's likely no malice in there, but it still makes things more difficult for someone who just loves a particular theme and wants to produce other things that people can enjoy because the people who own the property take it far too seriously and think that slapping their logo across the chest of a shirt is enough of an effort.

[galerion]

Yeah I know all about the edge guy i'm a avid gamer with 500+ games and probably the most valuable game I have is either the big box of ff8 or the press pack of ff10. If any advertising on the games site is causing to many complaints then my first suggestion would be to try and get a ad on some of the anime sites like http://www.watchcartoononline.com/ http://justdubs.tv/ http://www.animefreak.tv/ http://www.justanimedubbed.tv/. There will be gamers on those sites for sure and there won't be devs looking for feedback for their games.

[guarddog14]

Sorry to bring up a old thread, but reading what artygamer said, if there is no mention of the brand but it is in a keyword in the background for example on amazon if i made a mug saying keep calm winter is coming , dont mention that it could be from or related to game of thrones, but then in the search terms put game of thrones , that would make people see it and not have any mention of it in the advert would that work for you? or not?