Court Rulings
SID & JOHNNY
Dennis Morris was a photographer who recorded the Sex Pistols’ legendary 1977 tours, capturing at least one iconic on-stage image of Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious. Russell Young is an artist who found that image on the internet and used it, without Morris’s permission, in a series of Warhol-like pieces. Morris v. Young, decided yesterday by Judge Gee of…
Read MoreYOGA: A COPYRIGHT MEDITATION
A Bikram Yoga studio just opened not far from my office, and almost before I could ask, “What’s Bikram Yoga?” the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, in Bikram’s Yoga College of India v. Evolation Yoga, has told me what it is and one thing it is not—copyrightable as a “choreographic work.” Details after the jump.
Read MoreAN ®-RATED SUCKER BORN EVERY MINUTE
Since 1979, Marsha Fox has sold chocolate, rooster-shaped lollipops — especially popular among fans of the University of South Carolina and Jacksonville State Gamecocks — using the fully intended double entendre COCK SUCKER. In 2001 she applied to the United States Patent and Trademark Office to register the design shown here as a trademark. Yesterday the United States Court of…
Read MoreGRADE PECULATION
As Professors Aufderheide and Jaszi write in their book Reclaiming Fair Use (Chicago 2011), “fair use becomes real only when people use it; like a muscle, it can shrink with disuse.” Kudos then to fulltime high school teacher Rob Rang and NFLdraftscout.com, for which Rang moonlights as an NFL Draft analyst. It must have been…
Read MoreGOOD PORTENTS FOR GOOGLE LIBRARY?
We were waiting and watching for what promised to be a landmark fair use decision from Judge Denny Chin in the Google Library litigation when the case was stayed while its certification as a class action was appealed. In the meantime, a companion case before Judge Harold Baer, The Authors Guild v. Hathitrust, involving a consortium of universities…
Read MoreCOOKIES & MILF
Vermont’s finest ice cream purveyors, Ben & Jerry, scored a quick, preliminary legal victory this past week against porn producer Caballero Video. A few excerpts from the Temporary Restraining Order issued by the U.S. District Court in Manhattan will convey the flavor of the dispute: Defendants are hereby restrained from using the designations BEN & CHERRY’S,…
Read MoreRED SHOES DON'T MAKE IT
Here is what I know about Louboutin shoes — the bottoms (what I have now learned are called “outsoles”) are bright red. Given how far removed I am from the vanguard of women’s shoe fashion, my association of red outsoles with the Louboutin brand ought to be conclusive evidence that red outsoles are one very powerful trademark. …
Read MoreO MARILYN, MY MARILYN
” Imagine for a moment that you earned a nickel every time that Marilyn Monroe’s “name, likeness, or persona” was exploited for commercial purposes. Now imagine it was hundreds or thousands of dollars every time. The California Legislature tried very hard to gift wrap that bonanza for the beneficiaries of Monroe’s estate, primarily her acting coach Lee Strasberg’s…
Read MoreTHE 2001 DEFENSE
The epic Apple-Samsung patent dispute is now on trial and, justly, generating headlines in the popular press. In particular, it has been widely reported that the Court has prevented Samsung from introducing clips from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey in which astronauts Frank Poole and Dave Bowman are looking at tablets that have an…
Read MoreCOURT: THE PITCH IS THE THING
In a ruling that may make it even harder to get face time with TV and movie studio executives to pitch an idea (“it’s like Sunrise at Campobello meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer“), the Second Circuit has ruled that claims for theft of idea arising out of such encounters are not pre-empted by the Copyright…
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