An excerpt from http://www.sitepoint.com/retro-rockets-ip-lawyers/, by @alexmwalker
I’ve designed many book covers for SitePoint – mostly without incident – but we did have one uncomfortable moment back in 2008.
Tasked with designing the cover for a new PHP book, I decided that a clutch of shiny, colored rockets – red, green and blue – might be a nice look. Fun, shiny and a little retro was the idea.
I trawled the big, reputable stock photo sites and eventually purchased a 3D render of a red-chequered rocket (similar to the one above). After a little Photoshop persuasion, I had added green and blue rockets to the composition, and not long after, voila! – we had a book nice cover.
End of story – or so we thought.
About 10 months later we received a letter from a legal firm representing the Tintin licensing rights empire claiming financial damages from infringement of their product.
This came as somewhat of a shock to us as:
a). Growing up with little awareness of TinTin, the rocket was just a ‘generic rocket’ to us. In fact, only two of the original 24 Tintin books featured the rocket, so you could have quite easily read some Tintin without ever coming across the rocket.
b). We’d purchased the image from one of the largest stock sites on the planet (no names, but you know them).
Checking back across the stock sites, the rocket image and any image like it had since disappeared – presumably after similar letters.