D&D licensing questions with Pathfinder minis

[BBShockwave]

I am new to this board, but I have been collecting D&D pre-painted minis for years now. I was saddened greatly when D&D minis died off with the otherwise excellent Lords of Maddness.
So I am really happy to see the (in the beginning, mainly PC/hero-focused) Pathfinder Battles extending to include some iconic and many obscure creatures. My main goal with collecting (probably because I am a zoologist) is basically cataloging various creatures, monsters by type and race, and getting physical representations of even the most obscure critter.

Which leads me to my question... Wrath of the Righteous had a ton of classic Tanar'ri demons I never hoped before to see in mini forms, but... under totally different names. The (lesser) Nabassu is now the Death Demon, for example, the Marilith is the Snake Demon, etc. We even got the Gehreleths, but they are called varios Fiends instead of Farastu, etc. Same goes for other creatures too - Sahuagin are Sea Devils for example.

So my question is, can Pathfinder basically use the likeness of some D&D creatures, but not their names, as they are trademarked? And if this is so, why can't they use the likeness of the classic D&D dragons? I like Paizo's dragon minis, but to me they stand out from my other dragon minis and don't have the iconic look of D&D chromatic dragons who look distinct since AD&D 2E - the finheaded, greens, horned blues, curved-horned skull-faced blacks, etc... Did Wizards/hasbro copyright the look of their dragons?

[Liz Courts]

Depictions of creatures contained within the System Reference Document are considered product identity, so they're not going to look exactly the same. Even referencing them by the names given in the System Reference Document can mean that we'd have to include the Open Gaming License in product packaging, so they're referred to as "Treachery Demon," "Death Demon" instead of what they're named in the SRD.

"Tanar'ri" and "baatezu" are both terms that Wizards of the Coast use and are not included in the System Reference Document, so we can't use them in OGL-based products (such as the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game).

Without getting into the nitty-gritty details of licensing and product identity, that's the gist of it—they're different because they have to be. :)

[BBShockwave]

Thanks for the info!

As my aim is to collect all classic D&D creatures/beings, it's often kinda hard to look up whether a Pathfinder creature is the same as an old D&D one. Some are obvious (like, this ZAVACKUUL mini in the new Reign of Winter set is obviously a Roper), but some I only realized after looking them up online -like how the Invidiak (which sounds like a demon haunting Nvidia video cards) is the classic Shadow Demon, or how the Shaitans are basically the Dao under a new name.