It’s turning out to be a bit of an IP week…

Bill McGeveran reports on Avis, the car hire people, and their utterly unreasonable legal letters to blogger Eric Turkewitz (of the NY Personal Injury blog, mentioned in my Blawg Review earlier this month - a great blog). Turkewitz wrote about a case where the constitutionality of a particular law that deals with liability and rented cars was under discussion. He illustrated the post with logos of two well-known rental companies, Hertz and Avis. Avis wrote a letter complaining about the use of the logo (pictured, right), including the aggressively condescending remark (to Turkewitz) that: “understandably, trademark law is not within your area of expertise. Therefore, we trust that this was done out of ignorance and not based on an intent to misuse our mark to the benefit of your personal injury practice”. Yes. I’m sure that Eric’s practice income has gone through the roof since using an Avis logo in an article about the car rental industry. I hear that he’s just bought Mozambique with the profits.

Anyway….

Thankfully, after seeking advice (and some good comments on other IP blogs), Mr. Turkewitz has written back to Avis. In stylish form.

In one of those nice coincidences, on the same page in my feedreader I found this very relevant post from the Citizen Media Law Project - a report on the BidZick case (their logo is pictured here, too). It includes some (in my opinion unsatisfactory) speculation on bloggers-as-journalists (I’m not saying that I disagree with the conclusion - but it is hardly a model of clarity and the random reference to CNN BLOGS: YOUR SAY is equal parts baffling and pointless), and thankfully stumbles to the conclusion that the use of the trademark was acceptable. This is the right result, I would say, although it would be better, in policy terms, to have a clearer exemption for news / discussion / comment / criticial / analytical / secondary use (i.e. y’know, free speech!) rather than trying to fit things into a ‘news reporting and news commentary’ framework. And as I say, if this is what courts think of the bloggers-are-journalists debate, we’re in more trouble than we thought. It is right to be glad that BidZick’s pathetic attempt to squash criticism has been kicked out of court, but also necessary to note the weaknesses in the court’s dealing with the matter. (I’ve reproduced the relevant portion of the grant of summary judgement after the jump; read the PDF here).

All trademarks used in this post are for the purpose of illustrating the discussion and not to sell the product. Bite me.

(more…)

Look at this, Damien writes a post and a company by the name of Ace Internet Marketing copies the full article and posts it on its blog (with no context/discussion/transformative use/anything, not even a proper link to where it came from!). In fact, their entire blog appears to be made up of scraped content. And as we know, even those who agree with wide fair use laws, commons-based approaches and so on know that scraping other content and shoving it on your commercial site is quite stupid.

I was going to add a comment to the post wondering why this was, but it seems that they have disabled comments. On the so-called ‘blog’. Well, that’s a shame.

Unfortunately, they didn’t disable trackbacks. So if for example, I was to say something like Ace Marketing are engaged in disreputable business practice through copying other content and seeking to profit from it (with the appropriate link), that might appear on the site.

It would be a real shame if anyone else had this idea, wouldn’t it?

Torontoist has a fun post about the two sides of the Toronto Star competing for the affections of the reader - an industry-sponsored ad supplement on how counterfeiting is evil, and a fashion page article on how to buy ‘good fakes’. Heh heh.

Nothing like the confusion suffered by someone in the poor Sunday Tribune here in Dublin, though; the following notice appeared (in an out-of-the-way side location) in Sunday’s print edition:

Correction: London Review of Books, Anne Enright

WE published “Diary” by Anne Enright in the Sunday Tribune ed. of 21 October 2007 without permission of the London Review of Books, Anne Enright or her agent. We accept that the author did not wish the piece to be republished. We apologise to Anne Enright, her agent and the LRB for this error and breach of copyright.

Ouch. They did, in fact, publish the entire essay. I’m sure there’s some context to this but to publish a lengthy self-contained full article without permission from author, publisher or agent seems a little detached from reality…