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Monthly Archives: September 2011
You may have heard of “Winter” the dolphin who resides at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium in Florida. She came to the public’s attention in the winter of 2005 when, at the age of three months, she got caught in a blue crab trap off the coast of Florida. The trap’s rope cut off the blood supply to her tail, and rescuers from SeaWorld did not think she would live. She did survive, and over the next 18 months, experts designed a prosthetic tail for her to use. Winter has become a tourist attraction at the aquarium, and her story has inspired a film, “Dolphin Tale,” that hits theatres this week. Where intellectual property comes in is that Winter and her story mean big business. As human celebrities know, just about every aspect of their persona is marketable these days. Celebrities’ publicity rights protect their image, name, voice, trademark clothing style…
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The rise in internet technologies – particularly social media sites in the past several years – has created a lot of grey areas for intellectual property law. We have seen several instances of technology companies like Apple and Facebook aggressively protecting their trademark rights, even if they come across as bullies sometimes. Now Twitter is getting into similar battles protecting anything and everything associated with its service. A common area for trademark infringement lawsuits with technology and social media companies has been derivatives of their names – that is, terms like “lamebook.com” or “appstore” that closely resemble terms that the actual companies use. Twitter is complaining about a company that has already registered “tweet” as a trademark. Twittad owns “tweet.” It is an advertising company that provides services for use on Twitter or in connection with Twitter’s services. Twittad uses the phrase “Let Your Ad Meet Tweets.” Twitter users often…
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A little while back we wrote about video game giant Electronic Arts (“EA”) and several past NCAA football players squaring off in court over whether EA could use the players’ images in EA’s popular NCAA football video game series. A federal judge in New Jersey sided with EA, so EA is at least safe with that lawsuit, but the law still remains unclear as to when companies like EA have to pay to use the images of actual people in content they create. EA dodged a bullet here, as the company would have had to pay a substantial amount of money to the college players for infringing on their publicity rights. Publicity rights give celebrities and others who become famous the right to control their image to prevent others from cashing in on their fame for free. For now, EA appears to not have to pay to use the players,…
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