Tattoo Advertising/Human Billboards
…no adult stores and no “666, the mark of the beast”. In contrast, I think the bad-idea-for-cheapest-price winner is Kari Smith (a/k/a Karolyne Smith), a Utah woman who got a…
2005 Blog Year-in-Review
…Mark McKenna’s Branded Products as Ingredients, John Ottaviani’s Federal Circuit Refuses to Register Pennzoil’s Clear Motor Oil Bottle as a Trademark and Judge Patel: Maintaining An Index of Downloadable Files…
Man Bites Dog–Music Publisher Apologizes for Overreaching C&D
By Mark Schultz In a truly newsworthy item, Billboard reports that music publisher Warner/Chappell “privately and publicly” apologized to Walter Ritter. Ritter is the creator of PearLyrics, an software app…
We Hate You, Buy Our Stuff
By Mark Schultz Treating your customers well is always a good idea. Treating your customers well is a very good idea if they don’t really need your product. Finally, treating…
Amazon Pages and Google Library’s Fair Use Defense
…announcement have any effect on Google’s fair use arguments for its Google Library project? (My previous comments on Google Library, and Mark McKenna’s). A key fair use factor is the…
Rothman on Initial Interest Confusion
…confusion ‘doctrine’ to address any harm that may result from the unauthorized use of another’s mark on the Internet to capture consumer attention. Traditional remedies available in trademark law suffice.”…
WhenU Opposition to 1-800 Contact’s Certiorari Petition
…the “covert” use of a trademark can never support an infringement claim. But the Second Circuit did not rule that the unseen use of a trademark can never be infringing;…
Product Placement and the Apprentice TV Show
…got there. More importantly, we have tolerated many types of quasi-marketing editorial content for decades. When a band does a live performance on Saturday Night Live (or the Ed Sullivan…
A Sharp Stick in the Eye of Trademark Law?
By Mark McKenna Over at his interesting blog (which Mark Schultz plugged a little while back), Grant McCracken has a post discussing modern marketing practices in terms of their “roundness”…
You Can’t Always Get What You Want
…a big mistake for marketers. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what consumers are thinking, but sometimes it seems even harder to figure out marketers. Case in point: The new…