Shrewd of David Bowie to sell bonds in 1997 securitized by the future earnings of his copyrights. Moody’s, the credit rating agency, (not James Moody, who composed Moody’s Mood For Love), has downgraded these “Bowie Bonds” to Baa3, one notch above junk, because the future for copyright earnings isn’t what it
Discussion of substantial-similarity analysis for two screenplays about the difficulty in buying a Christmas toy (one of which was produced as “Jingle All The Way)..
Murray Hill Publications v. Twentieth Century Fox, 01-2668/272` (6th Circuit, March 19 2004).
Dyn-o-mite? You Look Fabulous? Two Wild and Crazy Guys? Aaaa-yyy, the Fonz? Keep on Truckin’? Hasta la Vista Baby? Cowabunga? Go Ahead, Make My Day? Where’s the Beef? Kiss My Grits? Isn’t that Special?
A Kinder and Gentler Nation?
Donald Trump has filed several trademark applications for variants of “You’re Fired.” As the Smoking Gun points out, “You’re Outsourced” is still available.
Article on the Right of Publicity here.
YOUREFIRED.COM, a website for selling YOU’RE FIRED ceramics, here.
Thanks to Sports Law Blog for the tip.
Blog reader Anthony Tambourino writes in to point us to this Slashdot article and accompanying discussion on the open source project Mozilla and its on-going efforts to convince the world that an open-source project can still have enforceable trademarks.
NY Times withdraws DMCA protest against parody correction page. Coverage on parodist’s blog here, including link to repsonse to demand letter.
Ben Edelman, (who, I am happy to say, is brought in to consult our firm’s clients on ‘computer forensic’ matters on occasion), responds to my previous item about the value of a generic domain name, specifically ailine-tickets.com:
When a domain name is a single word, or when multiple words of a domain name
A consortium of communications companies including Nokia, Vodafone, Microsoft and Orange, are asking that ICANN approve its application for a mobile-phone oriented top level domain.
News report here. Slashdot rumination here.
Calder.mobile from the Guggenheim depicted above.
All nine counts of MasterCard’s suit against Ralph Nader for his ‘priceless’ parody ad gets dismissed on summary judgment.
Here, Instapundit reports on a protest by the NY Times against a Times parody.
