I wish I would've seen this topic earlier this evening...

ANYWAY, I'm a cake decorator in a bakery for a very large, well-known department store. I have to turn down these types of orders a lot. Not because I think Blizzard is going to knock at my door. But because being a large corporation, we are watched like a hawk by some other companies when it comes to trademarks and copyrights. And there has been legal trouble in the past.

There's a line that has to be drawn. And in general, the safest path is just to say "No" to everything. If it becomes known that we are doing custom Warcraft cakes, next it will be "I heard you did a Warcraft cake, I want a custom Mickey Mouse cake." and "Why won't you do my Star Wars cake if you did that Starcraft cake?" And "My friend got..." and "Last time you made me..." And it becomes rough to close the gates once they have been opened.

We actually have to do the same thing with professional pictures, such as during graduation. It basically comes down to "We do not have the rights to copy this photograph and then sell the copy (in the form of edible image)". The photographers around here are all generally willing to give us permission (either the customer brings us a one-time use release form - the easiest for us, or occasionally we will call the photography studio), but being a worldwide corporation, we tend to attract the crosshairs, and there have been lawsuits in the past at other stores.

My advice? Skip the big chain stores, the big grocery stores, Wal-mart, Target, etc. You might find someone there that will do your cake, but more than likely the standard response will be no. The stores get hundreds of customers, and the scale of who can potentially see your cake can rise rather quickly. Even if it's not openly up for display, someone could see the decorator working on it, employees can see it, word can get around, etc. Then the customer takes their cake home and uploads it to the internet and it can be sniffed out. And then they find out that say, Target is doing unlicensed Mickey Mouse cakes (even if it was only one), and the Disney lawyers show up. And then someone's facebook photo goes around saying "Check out this sweet custom Star Wars cake we got at Wal-mart." Yeah... it happens.

A smaller, local place may yield better results. It's still using trademarked characters and art, but it's a much smaller scale, and much fewer potential eyes. They still might be wary of something like Disney or Nickelodeon or Star Wars or even Mario (I've contacted Nintendo about a personal cake at home and their response wasn't entirely a hard line, but that's a tangent...), but other video games and niches are probably more likely to yield a "sure, I can do that".

So in many ways, it depends on the store and the company who owns the trademark. Blizzard might not go after Angie's Cake Shoppe in suburbia for doing one Warcraft cake, but that doesn't mean companies like Disney, Nickelodeon, Lucasarts, and Major League sports aren't on the lookout. Now throw in a large chain store like Wal-mart or Target or Kroger or Hy-Vee that get hundreds of customers a day, and these companies have to step in to protect their trademarks and make sure they aren't being misrepresented and that others are grossly profiting from their creations.

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