Painting Young Dragons

Windstone heavily discourages repaints. This topic is a great example of why they discourage Windstones- after something has been repainted, it is very difficult and sometimes impossible to tell it from a fake, unless one has it ‘in hand’ to examine it.

There are also legal reasons. I will quote Melody and John in this matter:

(Just for those that don’t yet know, John is Melody’s husband and takes care of most of Windstone’s legal dealings)

OK, I was able to talk this over with our copyright attorney and he came to the same conclusion as I did. It is not illegal to repaint them or, probably, to sell them if they are correctly represented. It is also not a misuse of our trademark (Windstone) to use our name to describe them as Windstone sculpture as long as it is clear that they are repainted by the artist and not repainted by Windstone. But, he also agreed that if this gets out of hand it will one day create a headache when we can no longer tell if they are repainted Windstone pieces or painted knockoff castings. Or when someone else down the road misrepresents them. So, again, it is something we would never encourage.

No, it’s not OK to do that. If a piece is sold that looks like an authentic Windstone paint job it will surely create confusion and when you create confusion of origin because of the look or decoration of an item it is a violation of the Trade Dress of the company you have imitated, creates Unfair Competition and may also be a violation of their Trademarks. Bet you haven’t heard of Trade Dress before but it becomes a claim in almost every legal action when inforcing property rights against knockoffs, as do claims of Unfair Competition and Trademark violations.

Great question and just the type of thing we want people to ask. I knew going into this we would need to supply good information about Intellectual Property law and I have been trying to get our copyright attorney, Alan Harris (a very approachable and considerate fellow, by the way) to finish off the copyright law section of our site. We are all short of time.

Repaints of broken (or not I suppose) windstone sculptures – Last time I saw it discussed over on the LJ (which I know is not official,) it was not against the law, nor was it even discouraged. Has this position changed?

I want to make sure, because I’ve got two heavily banged up dragons living on my shelf that have been in line for a paint job…But I LOVE Melody and her sculptures and I don’t want to go against the wishes of her company (or lawyers! 😉 ) Is it alright to repaint them provided that it is an original color scheme? If it is, is it alright to sell them provided that we state over and over again that it is in fact a repaint of one M. Pena’s fantastic work?

This may have actually been stated somewhere in the thread…And I know the second post says that it is not something that is to be “encouraged”…But I’d like to know the official statement on this, in language less vague than that!

Restoration is difficult to do properly but the pieces belong to you and you can certianly give it a try.

While we can’t legaly keep you from repainting the pieces the problem is two fold for us. The first is that when the repainter sells the pieces they may be correctly represented, but what about when they are resold by someone else? We don’t really want to spend time and money having to police every sale on Ebay yet if we don’t there will, no doubt, be sales where someone is deceived.

The second problem comes into play when the sculpture is actually modified and creates confusion as to the copyright of the original piece. As much as we would like to see artists go crazy with all this, it really does create another headache for us. We came out with the Paint Your Own line because artists like yourself wanted Windstone pieces to paint and we would prefer that they be the outlet for your creativity.

Although this is all sort of a minor problem in the scheme of things, we would hate to see the resale market for Windstone pieces degenerate for any reason. It is also a very grey area of law, many facets of which have been rarely argued in court, and leaving not much to go on sometimes but the merits of the particular case at hand. Therefore, yes, you are getting some slightly vague answers and that can’t be helped.

And this last one is in regards to someone having a very hard time telling if their emperor dragon is a real Windstone or not:

hey nam is there a way we can fix them?poss even with orginal paint?i had bought a small white wizard,now i think i can match the few small spots of paint thats missing?but he’s missing the jewel from his left hand,does anyone now what color it was?the reason im asking about the original paint,is because somehow my peacock lap dragon,now has a little chip piece missing,on a side scale with the gold spot,its that greenish color? so i was wanting to know if they have touch up like kits?

oh darn the few tiny chatons i do have that would fit,none are a dark puple in color,that figures 😡

well i normally purchase four pyo’s each month so i can ask then,i tried to match the color but i can’t,and im not the best at mixing,to be honest the chip was strange almost like the gypsum had an air bubble and it got tapped and popped 🙄