So hey, I’m Michael Owen and I’m based in Texas US of A and I thought I was the only watch face freak.
I intend on creating a ton of faces, or at least play around with it a bit and I’m curious, can trademarks be infringed upon if I’m creating for myself and maybe some friends and not selling them?
A very warm welcome Michael, I look forward to seeing your faces.
If you create faces for yourself and do not publish them then they are unlikely to be deleted by the system/admin.
However, publishing faces with trademarks ( unless you own them or have permission to use them ) is against the terms of service and doing so would risk having the faces deleted ( and you could end up being banned if you keep doing it ). It does not matter if you sell them or not, publishing faces that infringe on someone else’s intellectual property ( designs, copyright, trademarks, etc. ) is not allowed. So just keep them for yourself and all will likely be ok.
Having said that, just go wild, come up with your own trademarks and designs, publish them and have fun!
Michael well arrived!
Thanks for getting back to me guys. So then I’m curious, how is it that I see so many trademarked logos like Ford, Coke, Mickey Mouse, professional sports logos etc and those people are able to use them and publish?
I’ve got another app that I can make whatever face I want, but it’s just for personal and it’s very limited in the different fields. Plus you can’t publish. Basically I paid 4 bucks to be able to change my background image to whatever I want, just with their pre-determined fields.
It is a fair question - I imagine most of those would breach the terms of service. From my observations, a great many offending faces are removed and some people have been banned. I know the automated system to catch some of these is up and running and admin do remove some manually. The rules are there, unfortunately some people choose to ignore them.
As another relatively new guy this is one of the frustrating things to me about Facer. Clearly the official view and rules is no name brands, but in practice they are apparently very slack about enforcing it to the point where name brand clones are actually being promoted by Facer as they occupy space in the “top 50” or “trending” lists for weeks on end.
Obviously they can’t police the thousands and thousands of faces throughout the platform, but it would take one guy all of 5 minutes to scroll through those promoted lists once every couple of days and remove the obvious name-brand violations. Name brands clones are popular (even when they are poorly made!) So they’re always on those lists. As I write there are at least 5 obvious TOS violating faces in the Top Free list, …and they’ve been there for weeks!
Welcome, Michael,
This is pretty much repeating what Mike posted.
That is a great question. I presume that those members have been cleared by the brands to use the logos and images. If they have not, they risk having the watch face designs removed, and could possibly be banned.
Um, I’d say the safe assumption is they have not cleared it with anybody. But Facer doesn’t apparently put a lot of priority into monitoring such things, despite the hard-line stance.
When you say “name brands” do you mean like watch company names (Rolex, Hilfiger et al) or like the type of trademark I listed? To shoot at what I’m aiming at, I’m talking mostly sports logos. I know players have an issue with their likeness but like sports/corporate logos, will that get me in trouble?
If you purchase any type of college or professional team merchandise, it usually will specify that the logo is a registered trademark. If it is registered, technically no one else can use it without permission.