Re: Anyone ever hired Attorney for Ghost Account
BTW for those who wonder, the court system has already set a precedent many times before regarding the First Sale Doctrine - basically once you buy a product (legit, from the brand itself), what you do with that product is entirely up to you. You can burn it, destroy it, sell it, whatever you like. The rights of the brand creator basically stop at the first sale level. Costco actually got sued by Omega for selling their watches without being authorized seller, and won. You buy it, you can sell it. Also interesting to note that attempting to circumvent this rule by claiming "trademarks" for the purpose of eliminating competition is something the courts don't seem to like either. Amazon with their enormous legal team knows this, however, they do have their own rules aside from the US legal system so dealing with Amazon is tough.
So if you list an item and in the description you use trademarked terms, brand name, and show an image of the item with a copyrighted logo showing in the picture, you are perfectly fine because you bought the item legally and you are using the information above to "identify" the item you are selling. The only time you are liable is if you are selling an illegal reproduction of the item...
Where we got in trouble here was using stock images of the products - still not clear if it was because of the models in the images or the images itself being copyrighted, I can't imagine that a brand would copyright every single stock image of their products but I guess they do. So taking your own pictures of the item is always the way to go, as using images that are floating around the internet is dangerous if you don't know where they are coming from.
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