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womble -> RE: Huge potential copyright issue looming me fears... (7/13/2008 5:59:55)
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ORIGINAL: jaybee
Ummm surely it's just a case of changing the image and the image name which will be in the CSS that you DID use sitewide didn't you. [8|]
Um, well yes, sort of. Did use a site-wide stylesheet, but the image isn't in the CSS because the header's got a repeating background gradient that's in the CSS, though it was simple enough to simply replace the image with a transparent .gif for now, as for some reason I'd failed to put the header section of the page in an include as I normally would.
The major problem was all the literature that's on the site, though fortunately the whole collection's not up there at the mo as we're in the middle of re-writing a lot of it, so I had to take the logo off all the Word versions of the leaflets (around 30 at the moment) and stuff and just take the pdfs offline because our committee member who's currently the only member of the team with Adobe InDesign that's got the templates for the posh versions of the leaflets and stuff's currently sunning herself in the Med!
The other site we have was more of a problem because the logo is on the site in various places, but not in the header, because it's a "working in partnership with" site, so the logo just appears on various pages where the two organisations and their history's explained etc., so that meant checking through each page to find all instances of it.
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Without seeing the logos I may be way off beam here, but they may not have plagiarised the logo. These logo bastards (it is becoming generic) tend to work in a very small creative pool i.e. they design safely so they follow the current fashion, they are afraid to go out of the current rut so they can come up with similar almost identical designs. When our Italian friends launched their new logo a couple of years ago, I found several that were almost identical although not in the same industry.
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I'd still say that if the logos presented were close enough to the other charity's logo then you may well be able to shout plagiarism.
I'm fairly sure it can't have been accidental. It's not that the two logos are just similar - they're identical in every respect apart from the colour and the name of the organisation, and the original logo sample they came up with for us was almost the same colour as the other charity's, and the colouring's so similar, the only way I can see it being coincidental is if they were using some sort of logo design software that's got objects built into it that you can move around and re-colour etc. The comparison of the two colour schemes is below (the file upload's not working for some reason - just keeps giving an error)
[img]http://www.ecanus.net/smileys/colour_comparison.gif[/img]
Friday it got even worse, because I was just about to email them the letter we drafted when I went off searching on their site for a postal address to send a copy of the letter to, and of course found no sign of a postal address or any other contact means apart from a contact form, when I ended up on their terms and conditions page. There's a long and rambling clause written into their T&Cs that basically ends up saying words to the effect that even if they design something that's damned near identical to someone else's no-one can make any claim against them. How it's written makes you wonder if a similar thing hasn't happened before, because it doesn't just say the standard bit about the copyright being the responsibility of the client ultimately as most other logo designer's sites seem to as one of the committee found when she did a trawl round the different sites looking at their T&Cs, but it's very specifically worded.
We've not heard back yet from the legal peeps NCVO recommended, but we've a feeling given the thing with copyright law and their T&Cs, sending the letter/email in it's original form isn't going to achieve anything. Oh, and we also discovered they're not a member of the trade body they claim to be a member of, so we'll be reporting them to them for falsely using their logo on their site.
After an emergency meeting of the committee members close enough to meet up in person yesterday we've decided the main priority is to get another logo sorted out because not having an "identity" is going to delay the work that needs to be happening ASAP, so my job for today's to put a brief together in preparation for sorting out someone to do that, and a group of the committee have been elected to contact various companies and subject them to the Spanish Inquisition before making a decision on who to go with.
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I can imagine the headline in the Sun "Chesterfield Woman Inserts Laptop Into Logo Bastard ". I reckon you'll only get a few hours community service and perhaps an asbo.
[:D] You're behind the time Donkey! At Thursday's emergency meeting our fundraising co-ordinator arrived and asked if he was in the right place to talk logos, at which point our Secretary pipes up, "Madam Chair! He swore! He said the 'L' word!" My response to this was, "No, swearing is, "f****** c*** logo bastards"!", so they're now known as FCLB for short and the members of the committee who have had rather a sheltered existence have learned some new words to add to their vocabulary. [:D]
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