Pakistani Daily Times on attempts to protect BASMATI Rice as a trademark in Pakistan.  Basmati is a seed varietal and not what is ordinarily thought of as an appellation of origin.

News.com on licensing of LINUX trademark in Australia by Linus Torvalds.  Discussion on Slashdot.

Via Reuters: JACK FM (sparkNet) v. JACKFMSANDIEGO.COM (ClearChannel).

. . . while I lay in bed last week, but apparently there really is an animated cartoon called MY DAD THE ROCK STAR and there really was an episode in which the heroic kids foil the copyright infringers.

Interesting developing story regarding adoption of generic/descriptive terms:

RSS is a file format used to create feeds (Wikipedia on RSS here).  Reasonable people will differ on this point but I’ll say that RSS is on the cusp of mainsteam consciousness, if not acceptance, and smart money is gathering behind it as a Next…

Friend and colleague Derek Newman of the Seattle firm, Newman and Newman, has started a website, FIRST AMENDMENT MINUTES, to archive his weekly one minute radio show on First Amendment issues.

February 20, 2003:  Alleged date of first use for MILLION DOLLAR IDEA in relation to product and invention evaluation services, and entertainment services (‘low-power’ TV show), by Roaring Entertainment.

March 2004: Roaring pitches Andrea Wong, head of reality programming at ABC.

July 2005: ABC announces ‘Million Dollar Idea’, to be produced by Simon Cowell and…

NY Times editorial: ‘What’s In A Name?’