Thanks to a mutual friend with ITS Tactical, we just found out that South Florida UAV manufacturer, United Drones is using the ITS Tactical logo on one of its products. See below.
What do you think? In our opinion, ITS has worked hard to establish that icon as a source of recognition. Its use by United Drones is uncool. ITS Tactical has asked them to stop, to no avail. Hopefully, this next round of legal pressure will get United Drones to stop.
Thanks BH
Tags: ITS Tactical
Agreed. ITS is a well known group, proudly improving the working-tactical environment, and their trademark logo is an established icon for ITS. Manipulating and making minor changes to this iconic logo does nothing but point out that United Drones trespassed upon ITS property and territory.
Loyal Soldier Systems readers, and ITS readers and members, will make sure the word gets out into the community. We know who the icon belongs to…
This is absolutely pathetic and is not the sort of thing acceptable in this industry.
Bad form. The ITS logo has a pretty unique “skull” IMO. United Drones is wrong to use it.
Yeah wow. I wonder if the offending company is going to be firing somebody tomorrow (someone on-staff who claims to dabble in design) or suing somebody next week (some freelancer who damaged a client’s reputation and could be on the hook to replace ALL the collateral materials with the stolen IP on it).
What’s REALLY unfortunate about the theft of that IP is how amateurishly the ITS face was worked into the balance of the offending logo.
Looks like all they have to do is scrap the branding for a few of their platforms. As they give a couple of each to Bryan for use in ITS surveillance/counter-surveillance training…
Perhaps you should post the company’s contact information.
ITS is very well respected in the shooting industry/ culture. I’m sure many of us will send them emails of indignation.
I thought the same thing we need some email contact info to all send them some hate mail!
Wow what knobs. Let em fry Bryan.
Wow, for shame indeed! Bryan is a stand up guy and works hard for the tactical community in general. Let our voices be heard to stop this!
How hard is it for them to use another skull? I hate this. Stupid. Takes 1 min max to even draw a new skull!
Parasites!
Has ITS Tactical registered their logo as a trademark? If so, this screams lawsuit. Nothing to do with industry etiquette, but rather business law.
That’s pure unadulterated scumbagery!
Ya Brad, this Brad agrees. Gotta have that trademark. This is an industry that the consumers can be very offensive and not to be messed with. Bad word of mouth spreads very far very fast.
as a designer you constantly get asked to just use stuff you find on google, mixed in with the myth that if you change something by 10% or whatever it is fair game. some do it out of asshatness, some out of ignorance. really common, see this blog which showcases stolen artwork:
http://youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com/blog3/
Wow – pretty low by United Drones.
Is the ITS Logo Copywrited?
That’s a tough call. From a legal perspective I don’t think the skull is sufficient art to constitute an infringement. All they would need to do is show similar skull designs which is probably easy to do.
It’s not like a counterfeit case. Use of the logo in question does not provide financial gain and they are as divergent in their business activities as day and night.
The best bet, if ITS finds it to be an issue, is to open a discussion with the company amicably and it’s likely they put a few bucks in his pocket.
I think a sof team in Saudi Arabia adopted the ITS logo for their HRT. Saw the guys in Jordan with the patches everywhere. Hell maybe they just all had crew leader memberships?
I just recieved an auto reply from them and it said a reply in 24 hours from info@enteklabs.com
The shocking thing was when you send it to the first address I gave you it will give an auto reply with a differnt name but most shocking was next to the address was the very same ITS Logo!!!
UN REAL!!!
Brian,
I am very sorry that you feel that way. The logo was properly and legally trademarked and given our common law enforcement and military backgrounds we both understand playing according to the rules.
IT’S Tactical seems like a very solid organization, but I assure you ITS was not the impetus for the logo.
Warm Regards,
UD
Sent from my iPhone
Brian, seems like you got the same response out of United Drones that I did when the CEO of the company contacted me after I had their YouTube and Vimeo videos pulled down for violating our trademark (inclusion of our logo in their videos.) In our conversation he mentioned that he’d have to go back and see how they came up with the design, but assured me that they had the trademarks and copyrights. We’ll see about that when we proceed down the path we are. They changed their Website after the videos were taken down since they were such a core part of their landing page site and have updated it since with a site sans video.
There’s no denying that they’ve copied our logo that I drew with my own hand when I started ITS Tactical. It’s disheartening that another American business in a similar industry would feel it’s ok to simply make a few changes to someone’s intellectual property and call it their own.
I’ve tried to reach back out to the CEO amicably after he never followed up with me, but have not heard back from him after leaving a voicemail. This issue has been going on for weeks now, but as evident by the video that ran on the WINK news network yesterday, they’re continuing to use our logo.
I appreciate Eric at Soldier Systems bringing attention to this issue and truly do hope for the best, but I’m not optimistic that United Drones will cease to continue to use this.
Thank you to everyone for your thoughts and support on this, I’ll keep everyone updated on the progress.
Respectfully,
Bryan Black, Founder and Editor-in-Chief
ITS Tactical
Gotta agree with Sal Palma on this one. Close, but no cigar.
Why does anyone and everything even remotely associated with MIL/LE have to put a fookin’ skull on their logo? Personally, I’m tired of skulls. Let’s try something else.
Just because they added something around the skull doesn’t mean the skull isn’t the same. It is. Bryan created that logo.
I agree, that skull is the exact same minus the black wedge up top. It’s not exactly a common thing to have a skull with no mouth on it so that raises suspicion right away and when you look closer you notice that the shape of the eyes and the nose are the same and the overall shape of skull is the same too right down to the way it’s cut in beneath the cheek bones.
I just did a comparison of the two in Photoshop by overlaying the United Drones logo over the ITS logo and they’re close but not exactly the same. So I’d say that UD didn’t rip the off the ITS skull wholesale since it doesn’t line up exactly, it seems like they used the ITS skull as reference and basically redrew thinking that by changing things a little makes it theirs.
At the least I’d say that they’re about 95% similar but probably closer to 98% – 99%. The contours of the UD skull is slightly different around the temples and the chin is flat where ITS has a slight cleft. If you want, I can do a pic with the UD skull outlined over the ITS logo.
Don’t think ITS will win this one.
I think it would depend on whether or not ITS’ logo is copyrighted or not, if it is then I’d think that ITS has a pretty good case. As I said previously, I did a comparison of the two in Photoshop and they’re nearly identical. I think that the only reason that they’re not 100% identical is because they didn’t pull the ITS logo from their website and fill in the wedge but redrew it based on the ITS logo.
Here’s a link to the comparison I did, the red outline represents the UD skull and you will have to look close to see where it differs from the ITS skull.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v13/Riceball/Misc/ITS-UDcompare.jpg
It’s obvious that key elements of the eyes and nose were directly copied. In court they’d need to be able to explain how this happened.
Not to mention the general shape of the skull and the way it goes in around the cheek bones as well as the fact that it has no mouth. It’s way, way, way too exact a copy to say that they came up with the design on their own. All they really needed to do was to add a mouth and change the way the cheeks are and they could better claim that it was their own design.
I don’t think that some of these debates are getting the whole premise of this argument. So what if people are tired of sculls or sculls are sculls… Even changing it by a fraction of the exact Photoshop design makes it right and out of luck to have a case! Come ON GUYS!!! This guy at UN (United Drones) isn’t a dummy but actually strikes me as a smart guy. On the other hand he is a total Jack Ass! And is completely out of line and clearly has no argument what so ever. He jacked Bryan’s Logo to the T in my books and I feel the main reason he did is Bryan has allot of exposure over seas with our troops wearing his logo on the front of there vest and the guy at UN thought of a way to highjack exposure Bryan has paved for years. And he could give a rats ass what anyone thinks because lets face it he knew exactly what he was doing! Unfortunately this is exactly what ruthless business is all about. Copy ideas and profit weather it is right or not. That is the point we should be making in our comments.