Social networking and digital gifts – small images that user trade with each other – seem to be a match made in web design heaven. There’s a vast array of social networks out there and everyone on them seems to be sending someone else something.

But when does this seeming bit of web design fun, become something much more serious – in short, when do the lawyers get involved? As we are aware brand owners take their intellectual property rights very seriously, this also extends to the way in which there brand is managed online.

A developer taking brand logo and publishing it onto a Facebook page or making it into a digital gift which users can buy, may seem harmless, but consider this sobering thought; brand owners enforce their intellectual property rights with an almost obsessive quality. And judges don’t just award damages when the brand owners win, the hand over a share of the developer’s profits