If you sell your cards and other stamped creations, be sure to add the name of the stamp company to the back of your card. Sometimes, companies include a very small stamp within a stamp set that says their name and you can use it to i.d. which company's stamps you used. At times, I have used tiny printed handwriting on the back of cards I've sold.
Before I started collecting rubber stamps (mid 2011), I had never heard the term "Angel Policy." By the time I heard it enough to look into it, I owned many stamps from many companies (8 boxes of stamps from endless companies). Here is my challenge: looking up all the different angel policies for these stamps. As a crafter, how I wish the stamps had a policy reference on them. For example, if the designer allows for 50 stamped copies per year and sharing is ok, a reference could be placed on the stamp so the public could easily understand the legal boundaries of using the stamp. IMHO many of us are innocently ignorant of this issue and the information is not easily attainable.
A stamp designer emailed me this helpful link to help me continue learning about angel policies:
If you have more information about specific company angel policies, please feel free to post or email me. I, for one, would appreciate it so much. Thanks, and keep on stamping (for yourself and a few friends :)
Angel policy on the stamp...ROTF! With all the "uncut rubber" (so, once cut apart, even having one with so much as the brand name on it is unlikely), smudged maker's stamps, and "label fell off" stamps floating around, you're lucky if you even know who made them. Then you factor all the makers that went under before people started worrying about what was "fair use" and what was "copyright infringement"... For example, I just spent the better part of the last half hour trying to figure out what happened to Rubber Stampede; I found a record saying they "merged out" into another company, but the source I found only gave the company number (no name), and when I tried to look that number up, there were no returns. That's more than I learned about Sugarloaf, (NOTHING!) which has some of my favorite stamps.
ReplyDeleteHi, I appreciate your views on this topic. I agree that many stamps are hard to trace these days making it impossible to credit the original manufacturer. I'm at a loss if they can still hold a person legally liable if they see someone selling their artwork on our items without crediting them.
DeleteCompanies who are still in business will expect us to abide by their individual policies if we choose to sell items made using their artwork. So if we do find the company currently in business or if we use an app like Lens to search images for a match on the original company, it's a very good idea and a professional courtesy to credit them when we are selling their images on our products.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts.