Labels and Copyright Laws

[JCasey1992]

I find myself facing somewhat of a dilemma.

I am planning on brewing a golden strong. I keg 99% of the time but plan to bottle these so I can age them for an extended period without tying up a keg. Given the fact that I rarely bottle, I am planning on going all out on presentation. I already bought Belgian bottles, corks, and cages in order to get that classy look. All I have left to do is make a label.

Considering I rarely bottle, rather than shelling out for a better printer that I would rarely use for labels, I was planning on going through www.grogtag.com and designing some reusable labels that I could use time and time again. Given my passion for baseball, I decided to name my beer Gold Glove Belgian Ale. I threw together a design in Photoshop using my favorite gold glove athlete and was just about to order the labels and then it hit me. Copyright infringement. Originally I found the picture on google image search and was unsure of its copyright status. For obvious reasons, I have since decided not to go that route.

Can anyone provide a solution to this problem? I really want to do this but also want to be sure I do it in a legal way. As a homebrewer, I have no intention of profiting off of my beer so If I purchase an "editorial use photo" on adobe stock or a similar source and put it into a label, can I have it printed by grogtag without negative consequences? Any thoughts on how I can get around this issue?

Thanks in advance for the help.

Cheers!
Casey

 

[Velnerj]

Try getting the image from a public domain site I.e. Flikr you can search for creative common licence photos in the advanced search options, those photos are free to use. You'll probably find something there.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

You're right to worry about these things, although in the real world noone's going to pay for a lawyer to come after you for a few bottles of homebrew. They get a lot more interested when money changes hands.

Copyright rules vary from country to country - Canada sensibly has a law explicitly allowing this kind of not-for-profit personal use. If you were to be taken to court, you'd rely on the concept of fair use, which includes the idea of how much damage your action makes to the value of a copyright work. If you were giving away an unreleased Beyonce album or Star Wars movie, that would be far more damaging than using a picture that's already available on the internet.

The advanced options on Google image search include one for searching by licence type - or just go on Wikipedia where in general all the images of people are meant to be free use. It's worth clicking on any given image to check, as the nature of Wikipedia means that sometimes people will make out they're free when they're not, but for something like baseball players there will be plenty of photos taken by fans who have released them into the public domain.

 

[madscientist451]

Stop worrying, have a homebrew. Any label you make is a private art project unless you are trying to sell the image or product.

But if you are still worried, there are lots of other great images out there that would be suitable:

 

[JCasey1992]

Thanks guys. I kinda figured I was blowing this out of proportion. I just placed the order. Thanks for the help.

Cheers!
Casey

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Stop worrying, have a homebrew. Any label you make is a private art project unless you are trying to sell the image or product.

Just calling it a private art project doesn't exempt you from copyright at a technical level. It's highly unlikely that anyone would call you out on it, but (in most jurisdictions) technically any use that isn't covered by fair use is a breach of copyright.

 

[madscientist451]

Copying a legally obtained image, music recording, video/film or other items protected by copyright laws is a fair use. Its been litigated up to the US Supreme Court Level.
The term "legally obtained" is pretty clear when you buy a CD and burn a song on to a portable device.
Are images obtained from from internet sources "legally obtained"? ask 10 different lawyers and you'll likely get 10 different answers, its just not all that clear-cut.
More information is available here:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jdlitman/papers/LawfulPersonalUse.pdf

But the bottom line is that no one is going to notice homebrew labels and even if they do, the chance that they will hunt down the homebrewer and be able to prove damages is about zero.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Copying a legally obtained image, music recording, video/film or other items protected by copyright laws is a fair use. Its been litigated up to the US Supreme Court Level.

Which is just one supreme court out of about 200 - this image could have been obtained from one of the other 199. For instance, I live in a country in which ripping private copies of CDs etc that you own is illegal.

The term "legally obtained" is pretty clear when you buy a CD and burn a song on to a portable device.
Are images obtained from from internet sources "legally obtained"? ask 10 different lawyers and you'll likely get 10 different answers, its just not all that clear-cut.

Sure, but take four examples :
1)A Beyonce track that gets used in the soundtrack of a Netflix movie
2)Downloading that track as an MP3 from an "unofficial" website
3)Downloading that track from iTunes after payment
4)Downloading from iTunes with payment and then sampling it in a track for sale

It's pretty clear that the line of legal/illegal is pretty clear-cut in those cases, no? In the first case the consumer's device may cache the music briefly but they don't retain a permanent copy, and Netflix has paid Beyonce for the right to use the track in broadcast films. So that's OK.
In the second case, the consumer pays Beyonce nothing but retains a permanent copy - that's obviously illegal.
In the third case, Beyonce is getting paid via iTunes for a licence to listen at home, so that's OK - until the user tries to incorporate Beyonce's work into a new work that gets sold, which is not something covered by the scope of the licence and her lawyers will come after you (at least, if it goes to No 1! ).

I use music as it's more familiar, but you can see the parallels with images. The likes of the BBC or CNN pay eg Getty to use Getty images on their website, so you can browse their website at no charge, but you're only cacheing a copy of the images temporarily, it's a "broadcast" situation like 1) above. But if you then start taking a permanent copy and incorporating those images into your beer labels and you start selling the beer, it's a 4).

But the bottom line is that no one is going to notice homebrew labels and even if they do, the chance that they will hunt down the homebrewer and be able to prove damages is about zero.

We can agree on that, which is the key point asfar as the OP is concerned.

 

[bleme]

I'm assuming the OP is in Greeley, Colorado so UK laws don't apply.
The OP is not selling anything - it is illegal to sell homebrew in the U.S.
If the OP wanted to wallpaper his house with DJ LeMahieu pics, nobody is going to care.

 

[lump42]

JCasey1992 I bet if you contact Grogtag about this, they would be able to give you a more definitive answer about whether the image is within fair use and your intentions are legal. If they were to print something that was an obvious copyright infringement, they could be held as complicit in the illegal act. Same reason that if you have a large number of wedding photos printed at Walmart, CVS, or Walgreens, they know request to see proof that you own the copyrights or at least reproduction rights.

 

[GPP33]

Yea, if you're not benefiting from it financially copyright, trade mark at patent infringement becomes very difficult and prohibitively expensive to enforce. I wouldn't sweat it. Even if they did catch on and wanted to make a thing of it the first step would be to send you a cease and desist letter, not sue for a million bucks. With something like this though I'd suspect they'd just be flattered.

If you use Grogtag however they would be benefiting financially so they may have some exposure.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

I'm assuming the OP is in Greeley, Colorado so UK laws don't apply.
The OP is not selling anything - it is illegal to sell homebrew in the U.S.
If the OP wanted to wallpaper his house with DJ LeMahieu pics, nobody is going to care.

The relevant jurisdiction is where the image resides, not where the OP resides. In this day and age you can never be quite sure which is the appropriate jurisdiction - a lot of Facebook and Google are technically Irish for instance, thanks to Dublin's corporation tax structure.

But it was more that madscientist451 was going beyond the immediate problem using the US as some kind of universal representative of how copyright works, when it's vastly more complex than that. It just sticks in the craw when people make that casual assumption that the world works in the same way as the US when there's various aspects of international law where the US is very much the exception. And copyright is relatively consistent across countries compared to the myriad interpretations of freedom of panorama or the rights when someone photos a statue!

As has been mentioned, Grogtags are selling something with the copyright image on - and it's sensible to discuss where the limits are whilst we're about it as either the OP or lurkers may end up going commercial in some form.

"nobody is going to care" - it's still useful to understand the boundaries between "legal" and "illegal but you're too small for the lawyers to bother with", not least in case you somehow get big enough for them to take an interest. Admittedly that's far more likely to happen with the music track made in a bedroom than with homebrew, but you never know.....

 

[mirthfuldragon]

[QOTE="JCasey1992, post: 8277125, member: 227475"] Given my passion for baseball, I decided to name my beer Gold Glove Belgian Ale. I threw together a design in Photoshop using my favorite gold glove athlete and was just about to order the labels and then it hit me. Copyright infringement. Originally I found the picture on google image search and was unsure of its copyright status. For obvious reasons, I have since decided not to go that route. Can anyone provide a solution to this problem? I really want to do this but also want to be sure I do it in a legal way. [...] If I purchase an "editorial use photo" o[...] can I have it printed by grogtag without negative consequences? Any thoughts on how I can get around this issue?[/QUOTE]

There are two separate issues here, and you were going to run afoul of both of them. However, I wouldn't worry too much about it.The first issue is the image itself. Any image taken is automatically copyright by the creator, and without a license to use an image, that is copyright infringement. The second issue is attribution. If you use an athlete's image (or an organization's trademark) without their permission, there's the risk of an implied endorsement or sponsorship. Even the term "Gold Glove" is a trademark (ask Rawlings and Wilson). Technically, even using the CR logo as your image is a copyright infringement. If you've ever been to a craft fair, every single one of those professional sports logo reproduction items is a copyright infringement (unless they are paying license fees to the owner).

One option is to simply draw something yourself - you can freely use your own image (automatically copyright you) for whatever you want. If you were to buy an image, that's fine - you have a specific set of rights (as defined in the purchase agreement) to do things with the image, and so long as reproducing it in a non-commercial setting is allowed within the uses permitted in those rights, you are fine.

Also, for labeling: I bought a back of 2" x 4" mailing labels off of Amazon, and I use a standard ink jet printer to make my own (the same printer I have had for 10 years now) and the results are really nice and cheap, and a quick hot-water soak in oxyclean removes them without an issue.

 

[JCasey1992]

Thanks for all the help guys. I ended up going with beerlabelizer.com and printed myself. Looks great for less money which is a bonus considering my budget at the moment.

Here's a picture of a prototype I threw together if anyone is interested. Once again, thanks for the help!

 

[thehaze]

I don't think anyone will sue for that label, so I would just go ahead and label your beer. It's not like you are gonna sell it in bars, shops and pubs, right?