I Like Pi: Trademark Registrations for Fun and Profit
SPACE MARINES Repeated as Farce Remember the SPACE MARINES bogus “trademark” DMCA takedown notice? In that case, a markholder succeeded in temporarily blowing one by a sophisticated technology provider, Amazon. This time, with the Zazzle-π issue, we have a much more...
My Response to Prof. Menell Regarding the Propriety of Relying on Pre-Enactment Legislative History of the Copyright Act of 1976
Prof. Menell Comments on 15% of My Article; I Respond. This is the first of a series of blog posts in which I respond, in detail, to the following assertion by Prof. Peter Menell in a recent blog post post made on the Media Institute’s website: Mr. Rick Sanders also...
King my Candy, Crush my Heart: The Weird World of Trademark Registrations
What’s Really Going on in the CandySwipe Dispute You may have heard about the dispute between King.com Ltd. (maker of Candy Crush Saga*) and the independent developer Albert Ransom, whose little company, Runsome Apps Inc. publishes the mobile computer game CandySwipe,...
The Color Run v Photographer Part 2: The Joys of Copyright Registration and the Perils of Being a Licensee
Part 2 of 3: The Photographer’s Case Last time, I discussed how The Color Run, a party with (as we’ll see) fairly sophisticated IP counsel, got into such a pretty bad, but avoidable, public-relations scrape with a freelance photographer, Maxwell Jackson, who is (as...
Is it Fair Use? Information Wants to Be Free, but Copyright Is at the Turnpike
We Took the Whole Thing, But it Was for Journalism! I blogged about Swatch’s dispute with Bloomberg a couple of years ago. At the time, Bloomberg’s motion to dismiss had just been denied, but the trial court explicitly did not address fair use, mostly because it...
Funny Just Isn't Enough – What's "Parody" in Copyright
People can be terribly clever sometimes. Take the Holderness Family, for example. Apparently, mom was too busy running triathlons to sit down and write out a family newsletter, so the family made up a rap to the music of "Miami," by Will Smith, and made the cutest...
My Response to Prof. Menell, Part 2: Community for Creative Non-Violence
(Part 2 of 5) The Fine Line Between an Alternative Basis and Simple Dicta The question we’re asking is whether it’s appropriate to rely on legislative materials generated by Congresses who did not enact but did oversee the drafting of the legislation in question....
Update on Candyswipe Saga: A Practical Look Back
Good Planning > Poor Planning, but Luck Sometimes Trumps All On March 10, I published a blog post about the emotional legal dispute between the small publisher of Candyswipe, called Runsome Apps, and the much larger international publisher of Candy Crush Saga,...
The Color Run v Photographer Part 3—Failing at Risk-Reward Analysis
Part 3 of 3: When Doing Nothing Is the Best Choice This is the last in a series of posts about how the popular quasi-charitable event organizer, The Color Run, got into such a serious scrape with a freelance photographer because of a too-casual copyright license. As I...
The Color Run and a Photographer Engage in a Reverse Mexican Copyright-Trademark Standoff
Part 1 of 3: These Colors Run (Maybe Too Fast) to the Courthouse You may have heard the one about the quasi-charitable fun run and how it stole photographs from a freelance photograph and then sued him. Or maybe you've heard the one about the photographer who let a...
Funny Just Isn’t Enough – What’s “Parody” in Copyright
People can be terribly clever sometimes. Take the Holderness Family, for example. Apparently, mom was too busy running triathlons to sit down and write out a family newsletter, so the family made up a rap to the music of "Miami," by Will Smith, and made the cutest...
Funny Just Isn't Enough – What's "Parody" in Copyright
People can be terribly clever sometimes. Take the Holderness Family, for example. Apparently, mom was too busy running triathlons to sit down and write out a family newsletter, so the family made up a rap to the music of "Miami," by Will Smith, and made the cutest...
