to: communications@shgroup.org.uk

subject: "LOVE YOUR OWN HOME" ad

Dear Southern Housing Group

What up? The 2 birds in your "LOVE YOUR OWN HOME" ads (see attached)

look eerily like my 2 birds that I have been playing around with for a couple of years. As seen here
http://jabberous.blogspot.com/2007/12/blog-post.html
and here
http://jabberous.blogspot.com/2008/12/merry-christmas.html

I mean come on. Coincidence?

Please don't use those birds any more - or pay me to draw them.

Thanks
Mark Martin

2 comments:

~ tOkKa said...

-->> ..ah d' plonkers ..

>;'

Jed Alexander said...

My guess is that this is a coincidence, and if it's just a one-off illustration for this particular ad, I wouldn't sweat it. If it's trademarked, you might have something, but most likely you and the other guy came up with the same basic design independently. It's such a simple iconic design.

So, you know, the main thing is that you can keep using your bird designs for your own purposes, and these guys have no right to prevent you from using YOUR designs. I imagine you had the birds webpublished before the publication of the ad, and unless they start using these birds as a logo, it's not worth stressing about. The e-mail's a good thing to keep in your files though, as evidence that you let them know about it, but there's too much of this proprietary craziness going around already. It's not worth it and It's not even in the same country!