I am looking at buying a shop and noticed that the current owner does licensed/copyrighted character cakes...She told me that it was okay leagly to make them if you simply make small changes to the character. Like making the eye color different or something similar. Is this okay? If anyone knows, let me know. I thought it was illegal unless you have written permission from the owner of the image.

You're right, she's not!

Did you consider she's giving you this "line" because:

1. She didn't care about copyright infringement
when she was in business.

2. She's trying to inflate the value of her business
by including character sales in her total yearly
sales.

Needless to say, the sales totals of the character cakes should be deducted from her total yearly sales to give you a true indication of "legal" yearly sales. (This makes her business less profitable.)

HTH

P.S. You can, of course, purchase legal edible images, or character kits from sources like decopac (but no character cake pans are licensed for anything but home bakers for personal use).

That's what I thought. She does the edible images and the deco pacs, but she has all of these Wilton pans like Strawberry Shortcake and Cinderella...She says she won't do like a Batman but will do Strawberry Shortcake with a different eye color??? Anyway, thanks for the info.

JanH is right and this woman is selling you a bill of goods with the copywritten stuff. No using those pans if you take on the business

I absolutely won't be using them. I'll just sell them on E-Bay or something. There are a lot of them. So, my Husband and I are going to the bank tonight to see about the loan. I'm so excited that I could be running my own bakery in a month's time.