Logo Design Legal Question

kez.dublin

Can anyone help with this query... If a designer designs a logo for a client, then wants to showcase the logo on their own portfolio website just to show they have designed it...can they legally showcase it there even if the company owner asks for it to be removed? Greatly appreciate any help with this. Thanks.

Paulw

I guess it would depend on the contract agreed around the design of the logo, with regards to copyright, licensing rights, and usage rights.

Peregrinus

There's two issues. One, who owns the copyright in the logo? This is a matter for the contract between the client and the designer, but I suspect that such contracts normally assign the copyright to the client. He - not unreasonably - want to be able to control how the logo gets used, and prevent its use by others, and owing the copyright is helpful in that.

Two, who has the logo registered as a trademark? Again, the answer is likely to be the client. This is a lesser questions, since owing the trademark only allows the client to control the use of the mark in certain contexts. If your client is a brewer and registers the logo in connection with the brewing, distribution and sale of beer and the operation of pubs, then he has no complaint (under the trademark legislation) if someone else uses the logo to promote a design business.

The way around all this for the designer is to provide in the contract that the copyright will belong to the client (once he has paid the agreed fee) and that the designer will not object to the client registering the logo as a trademark, but that the client licenses the designer to reproduce the logo in his own website for the purposes of promoting his own business.

Of course, if you've already concluded the contract it's too late for this. You can ask the client's consent for this use of the logo and he may agree, but you can't force him to.