Retro Rockets and IP Lawyers

I've designed a lot of book covers for SitePoint – mostly without incident – but we did have one uncomfortable moment back in 2008. Tasked with designing the cover for a new PHP book, I decided that a clutch of shiny, colored rockets - red, green and blue - might be a nice look. I trawled the big, reputable stock photography sites and eventually purchased a 3D render of a red-chequered rocket (similar to the one above). A little Photoshop magic and I had added green and blue rockets to the composition, and voila!, we had a book nice cover. End of story – or so we thought. About 10 months later we received a letter from a legal firm representing the Tintin licensing rights empire claiming financial damages from infringement of their product. This came as somewhat of a shock to us as: a). Growing up with little awareness of TinTin, the rocket was just a 'generic rocket' to us. In fact, only two of the original 24 Tintin books used the rocket, so you could easily have read some Tintin without ever coming across the rocket. b). We'd purchased the image from one of the top biggest stock sites on the planet (no names, but you know them). The rocket image and any image like it had since disappeared from all stock image sites (presumably after similar letters). At the time we sought legal advice and eventually came to an agreement, removing the image from subsequent books.

Meet Moulinsart SA

After a little research it turned out that Moulinsart SA, the Belgium-based company that controls the Tintin licensing rights, are famous for their fierce pursuit of anyone they believe to be infringing the TinTin IP. Over the years this has included many Tintin fan clubs, websites and zines which, and this has made the company particularly unpopular with many of Tintin's biggest fans. But as they say, discretion is the better part of valour, so Moulinsart often get their way.

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by Alex Walker via SitePoint