Legal Question in Business Law in California

Are products protected by copyright law? Is my company potentially liable for this?

My US based company sells a product online that we buy from a manufacturer in China. We've received a letter from a law firm in Europe on behalf of their client also in Europe that claims that we "have made an unauthorized use of the copyrighted work of our client,".

What we sell is a physical product, baby pillows to be more exact. The products are similar, like all pillows are. They call the product "the Work".

More from the letter: "Our client is the copyright holder of the Work, which was officially made public on the 5th of January 2017, and has the exclusive right to commercially reproduce the Work and to distribute these copies. The Work is protected by copyright. Therefore, the Work may not be reproduced or made public without the explicit

authorisation or valid license given by our client."

Again, we are talking about pillows for babies, a physical product that we ship. There are no patterns or any type of print on the product, just pillows of different sizes with solid color fabric cover. The design of the product is not patented. They are based in the Europe and we don't even ship to Europe.

Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it!


Asked on 8/04/17, 2:01 pm

1 Answer from Attorneys
Bryan Whipple Bryan R. R. Whipple, Attorney at Law

Certainly doesn't sound like the type of intellectual property interest protected by copyright law. If anything, I'd say that trademark law might apply. 99% likely to be a bluff or scam; a first step might be to ask them to furnish an accurate and complete copy of their copyright, including where registered, date of registry and registration number. It's remotely possible some foreign copyright law with unusual provisions may be the basis of this claim, but it sounds phony.

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Answered on 8/05/17, 4:42 pm


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