Perhaps the best kind of IP story reads like a Mad Libs, with disparate entities who may have otherwise never interacted now thrown together to fight over a trademark or copyright filing or alleged infringement. Take something as mundane as, say, tires: a hypothetical story about Goodyear and Yokohama in some sort of scuffle might be interesting if you choose to dive into it, but there’s a far greater chance it’s written off as tire companies fighting over tire things like types of rubber or whatever they fight over.
Continue reading “Walmart Files Opposition to Kanye West’s Trademark Application”
Capitalism as it exists in this moment (and for some significant portion of its history) prizes individualism, or at least a version of that ideology in which corporations as entities are considered individuals. It’s a zero-sum game, we’re led to believe, and so each company is out to claim some share of the market, thereby taking from or excluding competitors. There’s not much room for collective action, and as such each becomes in its way vulnerable to discrete actions from bad actors. 
As a purveyor of IP news, there are certain stories you come across that, because of your age, make absolutely no sense to you as they pertain to the principal parties of the story. Conversely, there are other stories that, because of your age, appeal directly to you and those in your age cohort and likely no one else. The story that follows is of the latter variety. 
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are hard to escape in the news as the hot tech trend of the moment, as it seems that every business is jumping into the game trying to make some money. And if you’re wondering how exactly they make money, or what those buyers are purchasing, or really what any of it is about, you’re not alone; as prolific as stories about NFTs are articles attempting to explain what NFTs are to a public still working on wrapping its collective mind around how blockchain works. 
Anyone who has been in a grocery store is well aware of what are, for lack of a better term, knock-off or generic versions of more widely recognizable products. Indeed, as a kid there was few greater disappointments than asking your parents for a snack or sugary cereal from the store, only to have them return with the lesser version that they picked up because it was cheaper, because your parents had to think about things like budgets and not solely about snacks or the day’s Nickelodeon lineup. Brand names matter, is the point, and they matter a lot when it comes to candy, at least when you’re in the target demographic its makers are appealing to.
If you’re unacquainted with modern video games, having dropped out of that world as soon as the real world offered something more substantive to cling to (if you ever picked up gaming at all), you might assume that video games, by their nature, would be easy to find and play at any time. They’re entirely the creation of programming, so they would seem a likely candidate to be ported into whatever database to be replicated across platforms until the end of time. They aren’t, though, and while the game industry’s reasons for that decision 
If you’re someone who prefers to go into a movie or show cold, with no knowledge of what might happen, then you’re living in challenging times. Regardless of how you feel about the concept, we’re in the age of spoilers, inescapably and ineluctably. Avoiding knowing how the hottest show or biggest movie of the moment involves staying off the internet entirely, which is wholly inconvenient; conversely, if you’re the impatient type who just has to know the big twist or shock ending, there are plenty of places to go to get the information you’re looking for — including, improbably, the Copyright Office. 
Part of the problem with being an artist that is both world famous and also anonymous (or perhaps more accurately, pseudonymous) is that it presents a real challenge in protecting your work, should you choose to do so. Or at least one assumes; I am not a world famous anything, so I can’t speak definitively on the topic. But it seems to be a problem for Banksy, who has run into some 
If you’re of a certain age, you’re probably familiar with the many practices that were necessary to circumvent ownership and copyright in the halcyon days of the 1990s (and earlier). Given that many of us were too young to think about the relative morality of what we were doing, or to even be aware of copyright, taping songs off of the radio onto a cassette, or using the two-VCR method of making copies of the tapes you rented from the local video store was something you did without compunction. The point isn’t about the advance of technology or the relative behavior of kids decades ago, but rather that means of working around copyright protection have always existed, and persist to this day. 
I’m not privy to the thoughts of smart, creative people, but if I had to guess there are many ideas and stories bouncing around at all times, and enough creatives in the world to guarantee that there is going to be overlap between ideas, or similar ideas that occur concurrently, without any theft or misappropriation. Who could forget the summer of