April 2003

Spalding has announced that it will sell its non-golf business to Russell Athletic.  This article says that the sale will include ownership of the SPALDING name for those sporting goods, making SPALDING one of the better known split-ownership marks.

The article does not mention the SPALDEEN mark.  If you grew up in New York City, then

The domain dossier takes a string and searches the whois of the major TLDs (com, net, org, info and biz).  It reveals that domains names beginning with JESSICALYNCH, PFCJESSICALYNCH and PFCLYNCH are pretty much all gone by now. Other people named Jessica Lynch (presumably) registered jessicalynch.com and jessicalynch.net previously.  The rest got snapped up on April 2 or

Drudge Report article on Marvel suing Sony over rights to Spiderman here.  Gay spiderman here.  Heavy fellow painted as Spiderman (disturbing) here.  Typical Spiderman fan site here.

The Wall Street Journal has an article entitled “Tool Traps Poachers of Web Names” in which they give a nice plug to BrandCrawler, a service from BulkRegister.  Last Thursday’s Journal mentioned GenuOne’s product (discussed here previously).  I’m of several minds (and have various conflicts) when discussing tools which allow for policing or searching

Eugene Volokh via Slate on why Pfc. Jessica Lynch, like Zelig, doesn’t own the rights to her own life.

Explain-o-joke: In Zelig, the main character sells the rights to his life story to a movie studio.  There’s a lawsuit and in the settlement, he only gets back the boring parts.

Initial Interest Confusion (IIC) is, imho, one of the key doctrines in the treatment of trademarks on the Internet.    If a user is diverted to a website through the unauthorized use of a trademark (in a domain name, meta-tag or some other method), but any confusion is dispelled prior to purchase, is that trademark infringment

Denise collects links on yogi’s behaving badly.  The founder of Bikram Yoga is attempting to enforce copyright in his style of yoga and trademark in his name.

New York Yankees great Yogi Berra was so named because he reminded a childhood friend of a yogi he had seen in a movie.

It is generally