More 'o' Dora...and discussion of intellectual property

Ok, I'll try to make this my last one on this topic, despite how easy quarry poor Dora and her ilk are!

Last week I took my own picture of a Dora chocolate. Since then, I've been wondering if my post violates their trademark. I DID take it myself, and could say that someone took it not knowing about the trademark notice engraved into her back (after all, my hub did eat that part before I took the photo). BUT, I did then go on to make much of that engraving in my post. Hmmm...

On one hand, people post photos of the Dora character in the thousands; eBay alone likely has about 100 different photos people have taken of the huge range of no-longer-loved (or never-opened) Dora toys available. Are they violating copyright or trademark? Strictly speaking, probably, because they're reproducing the image for their own gain.

When I wrote my first missive on what has become the "Dora series," I Googled for Dora images, thinking I'd use one to liven things up. But then, I thought I'd be violating trademark / copyright law, and as a professional communicator that's against my ethics. But, am I any less guilty if I take my own photo? Where does trademark protection end?

For example, I used to work with someone who followed a strict sense of ethics in preserving the brand of the company we worked for, but would still copy images of other companies' logos from their Web sites for posting on our intranet. He didn't think this was an issue, likely since it boosted that other company's brand recognition. But he better than anyone knew that in many cases any alteration of the image's size or dimensions could water down or otherwise negatively represent their brand.

I've also been thinking of copyright for info that appears here in this blog. Does anyone out there know whether any blog posting can appear in future as an article in another medium? I'm assuming that, since this was clearly traceable back to me, the ideas belong to me.

But now that it's "out there," I know no-one can represent it as their own (yeah, like that's gonna happen anyway), do I have permission to do anything else with it? Say I wanted to develop a blog entry into a longer article, for instance.

If you're one of my two-point-five readers, and can shed any light on this, I'd like to hear about it. (And TIA!)