Do you read the Terms of Use every time you buy something online? It’s OK, neither do I. Those Terms of Use often include provisions requiring any dispute to go to arbitration rather than a jury trial in a court. Are online arbitration agreements always enforceable?
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Keep it Legal Blog
Can Fictional Products Infringe Real-World Trademarks?
August 26, 2014
Someone needs to put a stop to this kind of nonsense. In The Dark Knight Rises, a few references are made to a fictional software product known as “clean clate,” which can erase all information about a person’s past. This is handy if you are Catwoman and you live in a fictional comic-book universe. Fortres Grand (yes, apparently that’s how they spell it) is a software company that sells a product, named “Clean Slate,” which erases the data on an individual computer. It’s been on the market since 2000. Since 2001, they’ve held a USPTO trademark registration for the mark…
Who Owns the Copyright on a Monkey’s Self-Portrait?
August 19, 2014
When people ask me questions like “who owns the copyright on a monkey selfie,” I feel so full of…what’s the opposite of shame? Pride? No, not that far from shame. Less shame? Yeah. Let’s examine this serious, important, and hilarious issue. Photographer David Slater was in the Indonesian wilderness in 2011 when a crested black macaque used one of his cameras and took a bunch of pictures with it. One of those pictures was the amazing selfie seen above. Eventually the photo was uploaded to Wikipedia’s Wikimedia Commons. Slater filed a takedown request on the grounds that he owns the…
Using Copyright to Suppress Criticism?
August 11, 2014
Most artists don’t like to be criticized. Is it going too far to use the tools of copyright to suppress criticism of one’s art? That’s the discussion going around about comics artist Randy Queen and his use of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices against Escher Girls, a blog that challenged Queen’s depictions of female anatomy.
