How To Make Your Own Image Board?

How can I determine if I am infringing on Parker Brother's patent for a Ouija board?

• I had a friend sit on one of my Ouija sessions, and she found them captivating. She very much wanted to get her own Ouija board and start conducting her own sessions — yet — that old time religion upbringing had instilled a lot of fears within her — especially of demonic possession. Yet, despite these fears and others, her desire to be an explorer of the vast universe was stronger than her fear of evil. I told her: “Why don’t we construct a Christian Ouija board and build in a number of protections using icons of your church that will make it highly unlikely that any malevolent spirits will mess with you?” She loved the idea! We immediately got to work. She had much experience with the art of decoupage. So she obtained a lovely picture of Jesus and placed it in the upper right corner of her board. In the left corner, she decoupaged an image of a beautiful angel, in the lower left hand corner, was placed an image of the Holy Spirit (for obvious reasons). In the lower right corner, she printed out a small copy of the Lord’s Prayer. Finally, we placed a crucifix in the center of the board, and arranged the letters of the alphabet around it. But I had still one more idea because I knew that if her mind was not completely at ease with the idea of channeling strange entities via the board, her effort would be psychologically blocked, and might put a damper on her results. So I suggested that she also include on her board a “soul trap.” My idea for a soul trap was this: Create a small circle on the Jesus Ouija board, and inside the circle, place a symbol of the human soul. Throughout the centuries, and in a variety of Christian traditions, certain graphic symbols have been developed to represent the human soul. A little research on the Internet provided a number of examples. The soul symbol we settled on looked like an upright figure eight with two horizontal bars sticking out from the bottom circle of the “eight.” My idea was to place this soul symbol inside a circle on the board so that it could serve as “bait” for any demons or evil spirits who happened to "crash" a session. They would investigate the tasty little soul symbol, and become trapped within the circle, and, thereby, be unable to cause any problems. I haven't seen her in several weeks but got the idea of promoting these to Christian book stores and other church outlets. Any other help or advice anybody?

• Answer:

  Patents expire after about 20 years. Ouija has been around quite a bit longer than that. So...any Ouija patents have expired. Copyrights and Trademarks are a different issue.....