Star Trek Tarot

How do I contact Paramount Pictures to get copyright for the images on my Star Trek Tarot.
How did the Star Wars Tarot get made without copyright infringment?
Can I post a few of the cards of my Star Trek deck on this site? and how do I do it?
Any help would be welcome.
Thanks very much. Juli

The best way would probably be to contact paramount directly (www.paramount.com) I went there & clicked on their terms & agreements & the page -- http://www.paramount.com/studio/terms.htm#trademarks -- has a 'contact us' way at the bottom. Send them an email about it. I'm sure they hear from people all the time about licensing.

Good luck!

Hi Juli,

I think some of the answers may have already been covered on your last thread, but not sure if you saw them all?

http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=23445

To post some images here on AT you would need to send them to Solandia. The moderator of this thread, Major Tom, can probably give more advice.
edited to say - sorry, I may have misunderstood. If you want some images of the deck to be included in "tarot decks" then send them to Solandia. If you just want to post some images here then either upload them (but you need to be a subscriber to do that) or give an external link.

Look forward to seeing them!

Just to point out, I don't think that the Star Wars Tarot got permission to use the pics, and I'm pretty sure it was never actually finished.

I don't think the artist of the Rock & Roll Tarot got permission either, but he still printed up the decks.

HudsonGray said:

I don't think the artist of the Rock & Roll Tarot got permission either, but he still printed up the decks.

Click to expand...

LOL - that's true, but I somehow think that using a lot of other people's photos of rock stars is one thing (the individual photographers presumably didn't think court action was worth it - plus probably a lot of them didn't object that much anyway) but using ONE property - like Star Trek - on which to base a whole deck might be a lot more likely to get you into trouble.

I suppose it's always a matter of personal choice and judgement. Personally, I would not care to take on Paramount - the risks of doing all the work then having it stopped are far too high ( then there is the whole ethical issue of when it is or isn't okay to contravene copyright, but that's a whole other debate).

I think if this is a project for personal use there shouldn't be much problem using photos from tv and the movies as long as there were no publication - even on the web - beyond printing a set for yourself.

I think if the characters were original drawings then a case could be made for publication as fan art.

Hi Tom,
Yes, I should have made it clear that my remarks assume that we're talking about a commercial project. I'm sure no-one would take any action over a private project.

By the way, without getting into legalities that I probably don't understand fully, I think the reason for people like Paramount sometimes being very tight on all this is that apparently they run the risk of setting a precedent if they ignore one piece of art that uses their characters. I was told when working in Corporate Design, that the reason you have to stop any infringements, however trivial, is that these can then be used to argue legally that you have already knowingly allowed infringements to happen and so copyright no longer applies. As I say, I don't really understand all this, but it may explain a lot of what seems like high- handedness.

In many ways it's a shame. Some aspects of the whole copyright thing are getting a bit out of hand. They are currently trying to ban photography on Charles' Bridge here - and it is a public thoroughfare!

Something in the public should be fine, like the Eiffel tower, the Vatican, Golden Gate Bridge, etc. Banning pics of a bridge? Sounds a little strange.

Paramount would probably object if no attempt was made to contact them, unless the images were done as fan art or a parody, but you can't use images straight off the show for that unless you're doing parody collage. Disney is another that keeps strict control of their character images. And they have gone to court with day care centers that painted images on their building of Winnie the Poo & Mickey Mouse... talk about NO sense of humor! When the cartoon stamps came out (in the USA) Disney insisted they wanted a cut of the profits, so the post office went to Warner Brothers instead & put Sylvester, Tweety, Daffy Duck, etc. on the stamps. Warner Bros. loved the free PR off it. I see that now Disney is ok with the idea of their cartoons on stamps (without demanding a cut of the take) as a block of 4 is coming out this year.

Tom, if you're doing a commercial artwork, grabbing known characters for use, even if you re-create them in an original drawing, is as much a no-no as scanning copyrighted art and palming it off as your own.

Actually, it can get even sticker, because what you're doing is violating Trademark law, and companies HAVE to defend that or face having their trademarks eroded.