A resourceful guy built some furniture completely out of FEDEX boxes. 

Then he built a website named FEDEXFURNITURE.COM.

Then FedEx protested on trademark, copyright and terms of service grounds.

Then Standford’s Cyberlaw Clinic helped him out.

Now he’s doing the talk shows.

The analysis likely differs for furniture made of boxes he receives directly from FedEx and boxes he comes by after they’ve been used.  Exhaustion doctrines would apply to ‘found’ boxes.  Also, when you order supplies from FedEx, you enter an agreement to use the supplies for shipping, not furnishing your home (note that FedEx alleges breach of its TOS and this may rise to conversion as well (no pun intended)).

Via Mommy Blawg and Wired.

UPDATE:  UK practitioner John Lambert gives us an English perspective on this matter.

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 Big Thing. That being said, RSS is not the only XML format for feeds.

Dave Winer, publisher of the RSS 2.0 spec, has begun a discussion criticizing Microsoft and others for beginning to utilize terms such as WEB FEED rather than RSS.

Robert Scoble of Microsoft has responded, as have others.  On a nomenclature point, I, wearing my trademark lawyer tunnel-vision specs, winced at the term ‘RSS Branding,’ but it’s not altogether wrong to use the term ‘brand.’  A symbol identifying a standard can function as a certification trademark and in a marketing sense, as a brand.

Bearing in mind that there are competitors to the RSS standard (such as Atom), certain questions come to mind:

1.  What is the most user-friendly term for RSS?

2.  What is the most user-friendly term for the larger category, namely XML-based feeds?

3.. Are vendors in this multi-standard environment correctly identifying the standard(s) they use?

4. Should an architecture review board of some type sort this out, or should the market?

I am reminded of what happened with domain names.  Some people began using WEB ADDRESS as a user-friendlier term than UNIFORM RESOURCE LOCATOR (or URL).  Fair enough, but then NSI began stating ‘Register your web address with us’ which is either imprecise or flat-out wrong, depending on your views toward NSI.  For what its worth, my mother-in-law, who connects to AOL using dial-up, used the term URL correctly the other day

 

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 Peter Jones, with quote from Andrea Wong:

“Simon and Peter have conceived a fantastic show,” said Andrea Wong, executive vice president, Alternative Programming, Specials and Late-Night, ABC Entertainment. “Somebody out there has thought of the next Post-it Note or Starbucks, but they don’t have the means to actually make it happen. It’s going to be thrilling to find that person and make his or her dream a reality.”

August 2005: Coverage of lawsuit by Roaring Entertainment against producers of show.

If someone wrote a work of fiction where a TV network allegedly steals the idea for an idea submission show, the critics would say that the satire was heavy-handed.

Interesting looking outline re protection of ideas here.

Some of the accounts of this story indicate that ABC was proffered a confidentiality agreement but that it wasn’t signed.  You can’t evaluate the full impact of this fact without knowing the context.  Also, it would appear to have no bearing on the trademark issue.

Advising entrepreneurs on idea submission is tricky business.  For the purposes of a superficial blog post I might boil it down to:

1.  If all you have is an idea, and nothing patentable, copyrightable, trademarkable or rising to trade secret, then maybe you should remain at the drawing board a while longer;

2.  Do not be afraid to request a written non-disclosure/non-compete agreement prior to idea submission.  It is NOT analogous to asking for a pre-nup on a first date.  It does not send the message that you think the ‘receiving party’ is a crook – it sends the message that you are a careful person.  And if it does kill the deal, then, to quote Sly Stone, Que sera, sera.