Like photos, sales copy, order buttons, etc., chances are your logo will either be ripped off by someone or you’ll get a claim one day that you stole someone else’s logo.
Copying it is one thing. The gray area is where substantive changes have been made. On the funny side, Dogbert in the Dilbert comic strip designed a logo that supposedly was the “circle of quality”…which happened to look like the stain your coffee mug would make if placed on a sheet of white paper. A couple years later, Lucent came out with a logo that looked like the coffee mug stain. Wonder if the designer reads Dilbert.
There are only a finite number of shapes, letters, and colors to work with when creating a logo.
Here’s mine.
It probably resembles a couple of things you routinely see…and there’s even been a few kooks who have claimed the logo represents my membership in some type of world domination conspiracy.
If you think that your trademark or service mark has been infringed upon, talk to your intellectual property lawyer about it to see what, if anything, can be done about it. Don’t get into an “I’m going to sue you” flame war with the person who ‘borrowed’ your mark. Find out what your legal rights are and then pursue them.
For an interesting review of the logo theft issue, check out two related posts at the LogoBlog.org.
