On 2009-03-27 05:54, tikiauction wrote:
i'm not an attorney but I do have some links to the publishing industry. One thing to consider is any copyright issue. My personal belief is that you should be ok. Works produced after 1910 or so are protected by the international copyright convention. However, US copyright law prior to the 1980s used to require an explicit declaration (i.e. copyright 1959 the acme tiki company) and renewal every 28 years. So if the print was from 1950s, you should be ok, if there is no explicit declaration on it.

All the same, many of the reproduced mugs and prints that you see from iconic tiki establishments and even defunct ones are licensed or at least claim to be.

In terms of getting a print out. It depends on 2 things, the condition/quality of your original, and the quality of the copies you want. If you want to make art quality prints, you have to submit proofs and pay for color seperation and any additional processing. Even if your print looks pristine, bear in mind that the original proof that your print was made from was likely higher quality than what you have, so even in order to produce an identical quality print you will need to have post-processing. There will be a minimum order (usually at least in the 100s) even for limited art prints. The investment may not be unreasonable since limited prints are themselves valuable.

Hope this helps!

On 2009-03-27 06:06, thegreenman wrote:
one point - this is the original piece, not a lithograph as I first posted.

On 2009-03-27 07:54, thegreenman wrote:
how to contact his estate to verify authenticity.

On 2009-03-27 11:47, bigbrotiki wrote:
Why not just make them to order, here on TC? Figure out a (for today's economy: low!) price, and see how many orders you get.

This thing was done as a COMMERCIAL job for some brochure, that artist got paid for it, and thousands of other commercial illustrations like it have been thrown away. It's not the friggin' Madonna, it's old forgotten commercial art. It is only "art" to some because WE think so. NOBODY has ever come forward and asked for money for the hundreds of orphaned images I used in my books --and I would take umbrage at that if they would, because it was my work that re-imbued them with a context and thus with a value that did not exist previously.

There where a few images that I wanted to use that were cost-prohibitive, and this issue is one of my pet peeves: Greedy rights holders wrongly believing they are sitting on some imagined "gold mine", while all they are doing is keeping beautiful art from being rediscovered and re-entering pop culture --upon which they MAYBE would start seeing a financial return. Now nobody is gonna see them. It's like the suing mania, it is restrictive, not creative.

This of course does not pertain to the current crop of artists in the Tiki field.