US Trademark Office cancels Marvel, DC's 'Super Hero' marks; Reuters, September 26, 2024

Blake Brittain , Reuters; US Trademark Office cancels Marvel, DC's 'Super Hero' marks

"A U.S. Trademark Office tribunal has canceled a set of "Super Hero" trademarks jointly owned by comic giants Marvel and DC at the request of a London-based comic book artist, according to a Thursday order.

The USPTO's Trademark Trial and Appeal Board ruled for S.J. Richold's Superbabies Ltd after Disney's Marvel and Warner Bros' DC did not file an answer to Superbabies' request to invalidate the marks.

Spokespeople and attorneys for Marvel and DC did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Superbabies attorney Adam Adler of Reichman Jorgensen Lehman & Feldberg said in a statement that the ruling was "not just a win for our client but a victory for creativity and innovation."

"By establishing SUPER HEROES' place in the public domain, we safeguard it as a symbol of heroism available to all storytellers," Adler said."

Paraguay Loves Mickey, Its Cartoon Mouse. Disney Doesn’t.; The New York Times, September 14, 2024

Laurence Blair,

Photographs by María Magdalena Arréllaga

, The New York Times; Paraguay Loves Mickey, Its Cartoon Mouse. Disney Doesn’t.

"Paraguayans are notoriously creative — some would say light-fingered — when it comes to intellectual property.

Factories churn out knockoff Nike, Lacoste, and Adidas clothing.Paraguay’s educational authorities warned last year that Harvard University Paraguay — in Ciudad del Este, the country’s second-largest city and a counterfeiting hot spot — was awarding bogus medical degrees. (The school has no connection to the more famous Harvard.)

Paraguay ranks 86th out of 125 countries in an index compiled by the Property Rights Alliance, a research institute based in Washington, scoring 1.7 out of 10 for copyright protection."

Starbucks just sued this weed business for copying its logo; Fast Company, July 2, 2024

 GRACE SNELLING, Fast Company; Starbucks just sued this weed business for copying its logo

"On the outside of its repurposed food truck, the NYC-based mobile marijuana retailer Starbuds Flowers features a logo that’s hard to miss. The familiar graphic shows a woman with a pointy crown and long wavy hair descending over her chest, surrounded by a green ring that contains the business name. In her right hand, the woman is puffing on what appears to be a lit blunt, while marijuana leaves frame the whole composition. The logo is clearly a parody of Starbucks’ Siren mascot—but the coffee giant isn’t laughing. 

On June 28, Starbucks filed a copyright and trademark infringement lawsuit against Starbuds in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York."

‘Trump Too Small’ Trademark Case Morphs Into Free Speech Debate; Bloomberg Law, June 18, 2024

Laura Heymann , Bloomberg Law; ‘Trump Too Small’ Trademark Case Morphs Into Free Speech Debate

"The US Supreme Court’s June 13 decision in the “Trump Too Small” trademark case revealed a potential rift among the justices on First Amendment jurisprudence but did little to advance intellectual property law...

Trademark law, the Supreme Court has said in prior cases, is primarily about two goals: preventing confusion among consumers by ensuring accurate source identification and preserving trademark owners’ reputation and goodwill. For these justices, the names clause passed muster because prohibiting the registration of personal names without consent was self-evidently reasonable in light of these purposes; no further analysis was required."

How A Mickey Mouse Horror Movie Is Releasing Only 2 Months After Disney Lost The Copyright; Screen Rant, January 31, 2024

 EIDHNE GALLAGHER, Screen Rant; How A Mickey Mouse Horror Movie Is Releasing Only 2 Months After Disney Lost The Copyright

"Mickey Mouse is one of several popular characters who have entered the public domain in the 2020s. However, this upcoming horror movie is solely focusing on the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse. While the copyright claim on Steamboat Willie has expired, Disney has not lost all their rights to their mascot. Every Mickey Mouse movie and character evolution that took place after Steamboat Willie remains protected under copyright law, and Disney will continue to use the character as a trademarked mascot."

When Louis Vuitton tries to make you change your brand name; BBC, January 27, 2024

Laurence Cawley & Sally Beadle, BBC; When Louis Vuitton tries to make you change your brand name

"IPO Tribunal Judge Matthew Williams found in the couple's favour, deciding Louis Vuitton's opposition had failed "on all grounds"...

Melanie Harvey, a legal director at Birketts LLP and a chartered trade mark attorney, says the Osborne's case is far from unique.

She says in the past 18 months there has been a "huge" rise big firms seeking to protect their trademarks. She says clothing businesses, champagne makers and high end brands were particularly busy protecting their identities at the moment."

Artificial Intelligence Law - Intellectual Property Protection for your voice?; JDSupra, January 22, 2024

Steve Vondran, JDSupra ; Artificial Intelligence Law - Intellectual Property Protection for your voice?

"With the advent of AI technology capable of replicating a person's voice and utilizing it for commercial purposes, several key legal issues are likely to emerge under California's right of publicity law. The right of publicity refers to an individual's right to control and profit from their own name, image, likeness, or voice.

Determining the extent of a person's control over their own voice will likely become a contentious legal matter given the rise of AI technology. In 2024, with a mere prompt and a push of a button, a creator can generate highly accurate voice replicas, potentially allowing companies to utilize a person's voice without their explicit permission for example using a AI generated song in a video, or podcast, or using it as a voice-over for a commercial project. This sounds like fun new technology, until you realize that in states like California where a "right of publicity law" exists a persons VOICE can be a protectable asset that one can sue to protect others who wrongfully misuse their voice for commercial advertising purposes.

This blog will discuss a few new legal issues I see arising in our wonderful new digital age being fueled by the massive onset of Generative AI technology (which really just means you input prompts into an AI tool and it will generate art, text, images, music, etc."

Teaching kids about their intellectual property rights; KX.net, January 23, 2024

 Joe Rinaldi, KX.net; Teaching kids about their intellectual property rights

"Right now, our children are living in an ever-changing technological world. 

They are constantly posting and publishing all aspects of their lives, and just like adults, they need to understand their creative rights and intellectual property."

‘Who Owns This Sentence?’ Increasingly, Who Knows?; The New York Times, January 24, 2024

Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times ; ‘Who Owns This Sentence?’ Increasingly, Who Knows?

"David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu’s surprisingly sprightly history “Who Owns This Sentence?” arrives with uncanny timing...

They sort out the difference between plagiarism, a matter of honor debated since ancient times (and a theme, tellingly, of many recent novels); copyright, a concern of modern law and, crucially, lucre (“the biggest money machine the world has ever seen”); and trademark. If I wanted a picture of Smokey Bear to run with this article, for instance — and I very much do — The New York Times would have to fork up."...

They themselves have a wry way with technical material; this is less Copyright for Dummies, like that endlessly extended, imitatedand spoofed series, than for wits. Discouraged by their publisher from naming a chapter title after the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” the authors deftly illustrate this “absurd” circumstance by only describing in close identifiable detail the band and the song."

The Public Domain Benefits Everyone – But Sometimes Copyright Holders Won’t Let Go; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), January 22, 2024

 CARA GAGLIANO, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); The Public Domain Benefits Everyone – But Sometimes Copyright Holders Won’t Let Go

"Unlike copyright, trademark protection has no fixed expiration date. Instead, it works on a “use it or lose it” model. With some exceptions, the law will grant trademark protection for as long as you keep using that mark to identify your products. This actually makes sense when you understand the difference between copyright and trademark. The idea behind copyright protection is to give creators a financial incentive to make new works that will benefit the public; that incentive needn’t be eternal to be effective. Trademark law, on the other hand, is about consumer protection. The function of a trademark is essentially to tell you who a product came from, which helps you make informed decisions and incentivizes quality control. If everyone were allowed to use that same mark after some fixed period, it would stop serving that function.

So, what’s the problem? Since trademarks don’t expire, we see former copyright holders of public domain works turn to trademark law as a way to keep exerting control. In one case we wrote about, a company claiming to own a trademark in the name of a public domain TV show called “You Asked For It” sent takedown demands targeting everything from episodes of the show, to remix videos using show footage, to totally unrelated uses of that common phrase. Other infamous examples include disputes over alleged trademarks in elements from Peter Rabbit and Tarzan. Now, with Steamboat Willie in the public domain, Disney seems poised to do the same. It’s already alluded to this in public statements, and in 2022, it registered a trademark for Walt Disney Animation Studios that incorporates a snippet from the cartoon.

The news isn’t all bad: trademark protection is in some ways more limited than copyright—it only applies to uses that are likely to confuse consumers about the use’s connection to the mark owner. And importantly, the U.S. Supreme Court has made clear that trademark law cannot be used to control the distribution of creative works, lest it spawn “a species of mutant copyright law” that usurps the public’s right to copy and use works in the public domain. (Of course, that doesn’t mean companies won’t try it.) So go forth and make your Steamboat Willie art, but beware of trademark lawyers waiting in the wings."

'Steamboat Willie' is now in the public domain. What does that mean for Mickey Mouse?; NPR, January 1, 2024

Neda Ulaby , NPR; 'Steamboat Willie' is now in the public domain. What does that mean for Mickey Mouse?

""You know, he's evolved so much and become more 3D and colorful," observes Ryan Harmon, a former Disney Imagineer, of the character today. He remembers anxious talk, when he worked at the company in the 1990s, about the beloved icon eventually entering the public domain.

But that's not happening, says Kembrew McLeod, a communications professor and intellectual property scholar at the University of Iowa.

"What is going into the public domain is this particular appearance in this particular film," he says.

That means people can creatively reuse only the Mickey Mouse from Steamboat Willie. Not the Mickey Mouse in the 1940 movie Fantasia. Nor the one on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, a kids' show that aired on the Disney Channel for a decade starting in 2006.

New versions of Mickey Mouse remain under copyright. Copyright applies to creative characters, movies, books, plays, songs and more. And as it happens, Mickey Mouse is also trademarked.

"Trademark law is entirely about protecting brands, logos and names — like Mickey Mouse as a logo, or the name Mickey Mouse," McLeod says.

"And of course, trademark law has no end," adds Harvard Law School professor Ruth Okediji. Disney and other corporations, she says, use trademarks to extend control over intellectual property.""

Mickey Mouse is finally in the public domain. Here’s what that means.; The Washington Post, January 1, 2024

 Michael Cavna, The Washington Post; Mickey Mouse is finally in the public domain. Here’s what that means.

"Jennifer Jenkins, a law professor and director of Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, says that from a copyright angle — trademark considerations are a different matter — “You can use Mickey and Minnie 1.0 from ‘Steamboat Willie’ and ‘Plane Crazy,’ but you cannot use the aggregated later Mickey that, for example, appears in one of my favorite films, ‘Fantasia.’ You cannot use the copyrightable aspect of the character from later, still-in-copyright works.”"

Mickey Mouse, Long a Symbol in Copyright Wars, to Enter Public Domain: ‘It’s Finally Happening’; Variety, December 22, 2023

 Gene Maddaus, Variety; Mickey Mouse, Long a Symbol in Copyright Wars, to Enter Public Domain: ‘It’s Finally Happening’

"Every Jan. 1, Jenkins celebrates Public Domain Day, publishing a long list of works that are now free for artists to remix and reimagine. This year’s list includes Tigger, who, like Mickey Mouse, made his first appearance in 1928. Other 1928 works include “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “All Quiet on the Western Front” and Buster Keaton’s “The Cameraman.” 

The celebrations are relatively recent. After Congress extended copyright terms in 1998, 20 years went by when nothing entered the public domain. Works began to lose copyright protection again in 2019, and since then, it’s been open season on “The Great Gatsby,” “Rhapsody in Blue” and Winnie the Pooh...

Lessig fought the extension all the way to the Supreme Court. He argued that Congress might keep granting extensions, thwarting the constitutional mandate that copyrights be “for limited times.” He lost, 7-2, but the debate helped advance the movement for Creative Commons and an appreciation for the benefits of “remix culture.”

“That movement awoke people to the essential need for balance in this,” Lessig said. “At the beginning of this fight, it was a simple battle between the pirates and the property owners. And by the end of that period, people recognized that there’s a much wider range of interests that were involved here, like education and access to knowledge.”...

He continues to support reforms that would free up a vast body of cultural output that remains inaccessible because it lacks commercial value and its ownership cannot be determined."

Disney is about to lose its decades-long battle to keep Mickey Mouse out of the public domain; Business Insider, December 14, 2023

Grace Eliza Goodwin, Business Insider; Disney is about to lose its decades-long battle to keep Mickey Mouse out of the public domain

"That 1998 law is what all copyrights operate under today. But there hasn't been another extension to the law, so starting January 1, anyone can use Steamboat Willie.

But even though the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse is entering the public domain, Disney doesn't need to be too worried about imposter Mickeys popping up around the world. 

Every time the company creates an altered version of the character, it gets copyrighted, and all modern depictions of the friendly mouse are protected, according to LUC's blog. Disney also owns trademarks on the modern incarnation of Mickey Mouse, giving the brand's mascot even more protection."

Grinch-themed Christmas photos look fun, could have serious legal consequences, experts say; USA Today, December 11, 2023

Mary Walrath-Holdridge, USA Today ; Grinch-themed Christmas photos look fun, could have serious legal consequences, experts say

"Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the company that owns all of the properties belonging to the late Theodor Seuss Geisel, is reportedly known for fiercely protecting its intellectual property. Warnings on the topic appear regularly on social media sites, such as one posted last week by a Knoxville, Tennessee photographer who explained why she avoids doing Grinch-themed shoots, even though she is asked about them yearly...

"Friendly reminder that shooting Grinch-themed photo sessions FOR A PROFIT (that’s the important part… if you’re not charging a fee you’re good) is federal trademark infringement," she said, alleging that the company has a team dedicated to scouring the internet for these infringements.

"Several years ago, a photographer offered Grinch mini sessions and her post went viral. Like, super viral. She was slapped with a lawsuit almost immediately annnnddd…. she lost. Copyright infringement is not a joke," the post continues."

Trademark judge rules in favor of Arkansas State University in logo dispute; KAIT8, November 20, 2023

 Chris Carter, KAIT8 ; Trademark judge rules in favor of Arkansas State University in logo dispute

"In a significant legal development, a trademark judge has ruled in favor of Arkansas State University in a copyright infringement case against the Chattanooga Red Wolves over using the Red Wolves name and logo.

The decision was handed down by the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board after the administration at Arkansas State University initiated legal proceedings earlier this year.

The dispute centered around the similarity between the logos.

The ruling emphasized that the Chattanooga Red Wolves’ logo was deemed too like Arkansas State University’s logo. The legal action was prompted by A-State’s administration, which filed a copyright infringement case, asserting its ownership rights over the Red Wolves name and associated branding elements."

Justices Will Probe Trademarks’ Nature in ‘Trump Too Small’ Case; Bloomberg Law, October 30, 2023

 Kyle Jahner, Bloomberg Law; Justices Will Probe Trademarks’ Nature in ‘Trump Too Small’ Case

"The fight over ‘Trump Too Small’ is the latest in a series of cases the court has faced in recent years raising First Amendment questions over trademark registrations. Although the justices skipped deciding the broader constitutional questions when they struck down different statutory registration bans in 2017 and 2019, this time the nature of the government’s argument may force the justices to now draw a line in the sand, he said."

Taco Bell has squeezed out its last big challenger to the Taco Tuesday trademark; Quartz, October 25, 2023

Ananya Bhattacharya, Quartz; Taco Bell has squeezed out its last big challenger to the Taco Tuesday trademark

"“Taco Tuesday” is free for all restaurant owners to use now.

Up until May of 2023, the trademark for the phrase was held by the Taco John’s restaurant chain in 49 states and Gregory’s in New Jersey for decades. But then, the Yum Brands’ fast-food giant Taco Bell filed a petition with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to cancel the trademarks and free the “generic” term.

After six months, Taco Bell has finally won. In July, Taco John’s relinquished the trademark, and earlier this week, so did Gregory’s."

‘Trump Too Small’ Fight Splits First Amendment Trademark Views; Bloomberg Law, September 22, 2023

Kyle Jahner, Bloomberg Law; ‘Trump Too Small’ Fight Splits First Amendment Trademark Views

"A dispute over a “Trump Too Small” trademark application hinges on whether a statutory ban offends the First Amendment, as the US Supreme Court recently found two other restrictions did."

At a Jersey Shore bar, Taco Tuesday’s soul lives on in a trademark; The Washington Post, August 21, 2023

Timothy Bella, The Washington Post; At a Jersey Shore bar, Taco Tuesday’s soul lives on in a trademark

"Taco Bell’s legal push to liberate the phrase, which has included the marketing help of NBA great and Taco Tuesday enthusiast LeBron James, has left Gregory with the last trademark of its kind in the country in what he described as a modern-day David vs. Goliath story.

“I just want everybody to know that we started Taco Tuesday,” he said."