I think it's important to remember the difference between copyright and trademarks. They aren't the same thing. "Dystopia" is a trademark and so is "DAZ" but one of the things about trademarks is that they don't apply universally. If sombody invented a drink tomorrow and wanted to call it "Dystopia", that would not infringe our trademark, nor would it be a problem if they wrote a series of books called the "Dystopia series". A problem would arise if they tried to sell a set of 3D models called Dystopia. This is because trademarking usually applies to products of a similar nature. For example, there's a car called Corona and a beer of the same name and there's no problem. There are some exceptions. Companies like Coke, McDonalds and Disney tend to be very agressive about protecting their tradmarks and you'd probably have trouble using those names on even very different products. Basically, if an uninformed observer could be reasonably expected to think the two products are related, there's a problem. I don't see how having the word "Dystopia" appear in the illustration on a book cover would infringe our trademark at all. It wouldn't be presented as part of the name of the book and even if it were, we don't have any intention of selling a set of Dystopia books, so we wouldn't take issue with it. Basically, as long as the book isn't trying to present itself as being part of our Dystopia range of products, there's no problem with the word Dystopia appearing on the cover. The issue of text in textures hasn't come up for us before and maybe that's something we need to discuss within the group so we can work out a future policy on it. However please feel safe and relaxed using the products in commercial illustration. There's no problem. As the artist, you hold copyright over the image, regardless of the words that may appear in it. If you sell that copyright to a publisher or author, they hold the copyright. We don't enter into it.

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