Showing posts with label Wal-Mart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wal-Mart. Show all posts

Saturday, April 22, 2017

COMIC LEGENDS: WHY CAN’T BATMAN’S BUTTON APPEAR IN EUROPE?; Comic Book Resources, April 21, 2017

Brian Cronin, Comic Book Resources; COMIC LEGENDS: WHY CAN’T BATMAN’S BUTTON APPEAR IN EUROPE?

"It all goes back to Franklin Loufrani, a Frenchmen who trademarked the famous “Smiley” face in Europe in the early 1970s. It had been around before that in the United States, but no one had bothered to trademark it. Franklin Loufrani did, though, as he used it in his newspaper. He then formed a company, the Smiley Company, to manage the trademark. When his son took it over in 1996, he really began to push the trademark and made the company a very successful company through the licensing of the trademarked image in Europe.

In the United States, though, the Smiley face had been used for years in various places. Wal-Mart, in particular, used it all over their stores. In 1997, Smiley Company tried to begin enforcing their trademark in the United States, which led to a long, drawn-put lawsuit with Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart even began to phase out the Smiley Face mark from their stores because they believed that they would ultimately lose (or, if they DID lose, they didn’t want to be unprepared).

In 2008, however, a United States Patents and Trademark Court ruled that the Smiley face mark was too generic to be trademarked and that the mark was in the public domain in the United States, which is how it had been treated for years up until that point. However, the mark remains protected by EUROPEAN trademark law."

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Wal-Mart's DRM Nightmare Just Won't End - Wired.com, 10/10/08

Wal-Mart's DRM Nightmare Just Won't End:

"Wal-Mart has decided to keep the music that it sold wrapped in a layer of copyright protection playable, following a flurry of customer complaints about legally purchased music becoming unplayable...

An e-mail sent to Wal-Mart digital music store customers said the company will continue to support the DRM-ed song files sold on walmart.com starting in 2003. The e-mail reversed last month's announcement that Wal-Mart would shut down the servers that authenticate the copyright protected music it no longer sells. Unfortunately, doing so would render all protected music purchased from the store in the past five years unplayable."
http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/10/wal-mart-will-c.html