The Idea is to create an editorial website on a sports events, mainly on NBA, report past games, write on upcoming games, present images which I will buy from Shutterstock and other images companies and more.
The websites will have ads to support its growth.
what are the main issues which I facing?
can I mention Teams names?
Players names?
show logo?
show images (which I will buy)?
** I'm planning to hire a lawyer in the future, but want to understand if the above possaible and what are the legal issues?
Are you located in the US? If so, in what state do you reside?
You can do all that you are planning to do with your website as long as you respect the intellectual property rights of others. That means you can use images you have properly licensed for use to illustrate your original content, using the trademarks of the teams in a descriptive manner only and not as a way to drive traffic to your site through an unauthorized commercial use of the trademarks.
Fair use is a defense to both trademark infringement and to copyright infringement but the elements of this defense differ between these intellectual property rights.
A fair use defense to trademark infringement is an assertion by the user of a trademark that the use of the mark is not to commercially trade off the name. A trademark therefore can be used for editorial (journalistic) purposes, when the use of the trademark is necessary to identify the goods/services being discussed.
A fair use defense for the unauthorized use of copyrighted material is a bit more complicated. Several factors are weighed to determine if a use qualifies for this defense to infringement. The four main factors looked at are the purpose and character of the use (e.g., educational or commercial), the nature of the copyrighted work (e.g., fictional, nonfictional), the amount and substantiality of of the portion of the work used as compared to its whole (e.g., a single line of a poem, a chapter of a novel), and the effect of the unauthorized use upon the market for or value if the copyrighted work.
In addition to the use of copyrighted works or trademarks, you also have to consider publicity/privacy rights. The players on the teams all have the right to control the commercial use of their names and images. They can be paid handsomely for the use. Their reputations must be handled carefully.
Here is a link to the Knight Community News Network. It is a site I highly recommend for online writers. On the home page, scroll down to "modules" and click on legal risks.
http://www.kcnn.org
Good luck with your website.
