derivative work

American Needle v. NFL is out ….

Some interesting commentary on Sotomayor and the First Amendment from Paul Levinson: * http://paullevinson.blogspot.com/search/label/Sonia%20Sotomayor * http://paullev.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=497539 * http://paullevinson.blogspot.com/search/label/Sonia%20Sotomayor I haven’t had time yet to dig into Sotomayor on intellectual property, telecomm, and other information law issues, but this is discouraging. Franken of course I have hopes for: After Fox News sued him for trademark infringement [...]

New York’s state tourism board is seeking to reclaim their “I heart NY” slogan. (link from michele) According to the article, the slogan was developed for them pro bono by graphic designer Milton Glaser in the early 1970s. It was used prolifically as a mark; then they let their registration lapse and stopped policing it; [...]

A few days ago, the Village Voice wrote an article about a series of World of Warcraft-inspired porn; their article was duly picked up by BoingBoing. Strangely, BoingBoing missed the IP angle — that “Whorelore”‘s original name was “Whorecraft” but they ran into an “IP” issue, presumably trademark. You can still see “Whorecraft” on some [...]

* Judge White withdrew his order requiring the shutdown of wikileaks.org. See also 3/1 bits blog. (NYT 3/1) * The music industry has yet to pay artists any of the money it has received in settlements and lawsuits; the artists are pissed. NY Post 2/27) * The owners of the game scrabble are pissed off [...]

This LA Times article reports on consumer attitudes in LA about “piracy” of goods. Of course, the author (Richard Verrier) seems mortally confused about the differences between trademark and copyright. Although previous studies have documented piracy’s toll on the Los Angeles economy, the U.S. Chamber report is the first to focus on the attitudes and [...]

give it up already. we all know that the red cross means the Red Cross. It’ll be interesting to see a major company actually litigate such a completely jury-unfriendly case. It will also be interesting to see if how licenses for intellectual “property” survive when the property — in this case, consumer identification of a [...]

In an SFgate story about conflicts between folks trying to take Shaolin practice in different directions, I spotted this: In recent years, the main temple’s abbot, Shi YongXin, has tried to copyright the Shaolin name. He’s also been criticized for commercializing the faith. YongXin gave his approval to Ho’s venture in San Francisco. Really? I [...]

One might think it would sometimes be in the best interests of a corporation to take the high road, but McDonald’s has chosen to go for the glory. McD’s slapped a cease and desist letter on an art gallery selling “Cokespoon #2″ — a gold-plated versions of a 1980s vintage McD’s coffee stirrer that was [...]

The NYT has two interesting stories right now featuring, shall we say, different approaches to artists and IP. The first in a genre near and dear to my heart is a profile of Dark Horse Comics, which “built [their] publishing platform around creators’ rights … [Their] pitch was, ‘We’ll match the rights that you get [...]

aka “Pokémon Producers Pissed” Pier Paolo Pandolfi of Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center has apparently received a trademark cease & desist from the Pokémon company (Nintendo) after cancer-related research on the Pokemon gene — which Pandolfi’s lab named four years ago, in 2001 — received headlines like “Pokemon Causes Cancer”. Sloan-Kettering has knuckled under, now calling the [...]

We’re finally finished with the summary report for our DMCA 512 study, which is officially released today. The final report will follow shortly. [pdf & html] Marjorie Heins @ The Free Expression Project is doing a complementary study; she released her preliminary report in early October and the full report will hopefully be out soon. [...]

Yahoo!’s historically less-than-stellar track record of protecting user privacy is made much, much worse by this news: Yahoo! turned over a user’s identity information to the Chinese government, and now journalist Shi Tao has been sentenced to ten years for “e-mailing a government’s plan to restrict media coverage around the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen [...]

John Varley has made more than a few comments about IP and information politics in his various stories. The Golden Globe (recommended) was centrally concerned with an actor named Sparky Valentine, and Sparky had a few observations about IP: In the early days, when they were considering various ideas for a corporate logo, Valentine had [...]

support your local coffeeshops with the starbucks delocator. [citing trail from wendy seltzer legal tags to Boing Boing to stay free!] and hey — a word to the San Francisco Art Institute: using a trademark to describe, criticize, or compare to the referenced entity is trademark fair use. look it up.

The governator has gone ahead & filed the suit against Ohio Discount Merchandise for making bobble-head dolls, claiming his right of publicity was violated. See the NYT article.