Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, June 5 — After being covered by news sites globally over a controversial logo copyright issue, Vietnamese Medcare Skin Centre publicly provides an explanation on their Facebook page.
Most recently, the Medcare Skin Centre from Ho Chi Minh City received a lot of press coverage. What happened? Their website presented their staff and locations together with their new logo. But, the logo was taken from the fictional Umbrella Corporation, straight out of the zombie video game and movie franchise Resident Evil.
The controversy
The iconic logo of the Umbrella Corporation is being used in a dermatologist office? People around the world recognize this stylized, red and blue colored, umbrella as from being used by that company from the Resident Evil games, which more or less accidentally turned humans into feral zombies. Beyond the obvious copyright infringement, this is the last thing that a skin care company would want to be associated with. Zombies just don’t make a good marketing match with dermatology.
A prank?
At first it was not certain whether or not this was an actual company in Vietnam or perhaps an experimental project by marketing students to research fake news or content virality. The photos presented on the website looked like mockups and photoshopped images. Even if that was the case, there still might be an actual company behind these mockups, which actually uses the Umbrella Corporation logo.
What happened?
Medcare Skin Centre has hired a third-party company to design their corporate identity, logo and possibly the whole website. On their Facebook page, they state, “We are very sorry the situation has occurred and is working internally to find the best solution quickly. Our team is highly specialized in taking care of skin conditions for our clients and logo design is completely out of our specialty and was consulted and completed for us by a hired third-party. We understand the urgency of the situation; and is working to quickly to provide an appropriate answer to our clients, partners, community and to the movie and game producers and copyright holders of the artwork. We hope for your understanding that the situation is not an intentional infringement of copyright by Medcare Skin Centre.”
Fixes in the making
The branding of Medcare Skin Centre is now being fixed. Simple changes like the logo on their Facebook page have already been done. Depending on who is actually hosting and managing their website, the removal of Umbrella Corporation logos there might take some more time. If the hosting and management is done by the very same third-party company that causes this case of copyright infringement, this might proof to be more difficult.
Aftermath
It is unclear whether or not the copyright owners will take legal actions against Medcare Skin Centre or their undisclosed third-party contractors. The applicability of taking this to a court would need to be verified against Vietnamese law first. Considering the fact that the skin care office had a negative effect based on this copyright infringement, and did not attempt to compete with the filmmakers, game developers and publishers in any way, charges might just be dropped instead.
Update 26-June: Medcare Skin Centre has now updated their branding and the Umbrella logos have been removed.
Photo credit: Sergio Fabara Muñoz / Medcare Skin Centre / Capcom / Sony Entertainment
Source: Medcare Skin Centre on website and Facebook
