I have made friends with a wonderful watercolor artist, Carrie Waller, on Facebook and she recently had an issue with an art organization not accepting a painting into their exhibition because she had depicted Ball canning jars in the work and they were concerned about trademark infringement. I posted a comment to her blog about this issue and she invited me to do a guest blog post on her blog, which I was happy to do! As I stated in her article, I’m not an attorney, I’m an artist, and I don’t profess to be an expert on trademarks and copyrights, but I do have some experience and knowledge on the subject matter. I co- founded a company a few years ago creating digital art for the art licensing market. Some of the designs that I created were to be mass-produced, utilizing vintage images so, I wanted to be sure that by using them I wouldn’t be infringing on anyone’s trademark or copyright. At that time, I had an Intellectual Property Attorney, and the information I passed on is from my own research that was validated by my attorney and information she gave to me.
Here is a link to my trademark article on Carrie's blog: http://carriewaller.blogspot.com/2013/06/guest-blogger-kim-minichiello.html