So the pokemon company allows people selling cards through retail to purchase their products through their local distributor. You can find the link for this here:
support.pokemon.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001004653-Who-are-your-wholesale-distributors-
This is awesome, I have my business registered with the local and federal government and I’m ready to sell product. Now here’s my hiccup. I don’t have a brick and mortar store, I sell various collector items online and I want to add pokemon cards to my product categories. Am I allowed to take pictures of the products I purchase from their distributor? Can I use the images of the various products I’ve acquired, even if I pull them from other sites that allow scraping? From the research I’ve done, the Pokemon company is extremely critical on people using their images, but how are non pokemon licensed retailers like me supposed to sell their products if we can’t use images of their products?
There are a ton of retailers that use these images with no issues and I find it hard to believe that they all have the license from the pokemon company.
Do you guys think I’d be safe to use the images without their written consent? Or should I just not sell pokemon cards and change the product line to baseball cards since they encourage the sharing of their images?
