Nothing to do with trademarks but interesting.   A Florida teenager was convicted of the 1999 murder of a young girl.  It was widely reported that death was caused by the boy imitating wrestling moves, and the case was widely referred to as the wrestling death case.  The Parents Television Council made the wrestling death case a feature of its fund-rasing efforts and approached Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment advertisers, presumably in an attempt to either dissuade them from advertising on wrestling shows, or to influence its content.  WWE sued PTC, arguing that wrestling had nothing to do with the murder.  Apparently they were right.  In addition to paying WWE damages, PTE has had to publish this public apology and retraction.

Gabriel Perle has an excellent chapter on libel and defamation in The Publishing Law Handbook.  Regardless of your field of law, it’s worth reviewing on a regular basis.

FUBU (its founders using the acronym of “For US, By Us”), sells clothing under the 05 mark, where the 05 is depicted as a numeral on a sports jersey.  It turns out that pro athletes (Gretzky being the exception) don’t use numbers starting with a 0, so FUBU was able to build some distinctiveness in the number.  A knock-off specialist, with a string of demand letters to its name, began selling PLAYERS 05 sports jerseys.  Copies of plaintiff’s catalog were found in defendant’s premises, defendant withheld evidence of sales volume during discovery, defendant’s officer committed perjury during trial.  No surprise then when plaintiff wins an accounting, lost profits and attorneys’ fees.  GTFM v. Solid Clothing, dba ZAM, 01 CIV 2629 (DLC) (SDNY).

Fun fact: FUBU paid rapper LL Cool J $4 million to wear its clothing.

Thursday’s Wall Street Journal has an article on “spoofed songs” on file-sharing services such as Morpheus or Kazaa.  The article suggests that the record companies are now uploading defective versions of their own songs (3 minutes of static for example), so as to frustrate users from utilizing the free services.  The “major record labels neither confirm nor deny the contention” however Cary Sherman of the RIAA implicitly approved the practice, stating that copyright owners ought to be able to do “whatever they can that’s lawful to protect their rights.”

“Spoofing” by the rights owner raises two sets of questions, one as to trademark implications of spoofing and one as to whether the practice can be extended to the “real world” counterfeits.

If the record companies are in fact spoofing, then the practice, from a trademark point of view, is unique (to me at least).  The owner (or licensee) of the artist’s trademark is intentionally distributing an inferior or defective version of the product associated with that trademark, deceiving the user (albeit a non-paying one), in the hopes that the experience will tarnish not the trademark owner but the means of distribution.  While it seems metaphysically impossible for the trademark owner to counterfeit or infringe itself, self-tarnishment seems possible (to say the least).  Also of interest is whether the free services will respond by filtering out spoofs and advertise that they offer only real unauthorized copies.

The question then arises whether spoofing can be extended to the real world in order to disrupt counterfeit operations.  An intractable problem  fighting counterfeits is that consumers knowingly buy low-quality fakes, i.e. $30 Rolexes.  It seems that the insertion of not low-quality but no-quality fakes is one of the few ways of disrupting this market.  However it seems like playing with dynamite if it becomes known that the trademark owner is responsible for the fakes. 

UPDATE: See this Washington Post article for info on a pending bill to “legalize” spoofing and other practices.

Janis Ian on how she makes more money because of downloading, via Slashdot.org.

The inaugural copy of The Trademark Insider is available for download from NameProtect.  The issue contains the 2001 annual rankings of U.S. trademark firms (Oblon Spivak led with 2,361 applications filed, the firm where I had been a partner, Fross Zelnick, fell to second with 1,289).  First quarter numbers for 2002 are provided as well (Blakely Sokoloff at 246, Fross Zelnick at 238).  If the first quarter numbers are extrapolated (and considering that March is the busiest month of the year for applications, don’t ask me why), then 2002 looks to be somewhat slower than 2001. 

Apparently women walk around naked at the Burning Man Festival, held annually in the Nevada desert.  Someone filmed some naked women there in order to sell a video.  Now the organizers of the festival are suing the video’s producers under, among other theories, invasion of privacy.  It’s interesting that someone can walk around naked in the desert and have an expectation of privacy, but given that the festival was likely on private property and that admission was pursuant to license (otherwise known as a ticket), then I suppose such an expectation is plausible.

You have another three days to see Greenpeaces’s use of this parody of Exxon’s ESSO logo , which use was enjoined by a French court, according to this Findlaw article. 

Bret Fausett if the ICANN Blog has penned an essay, “If I Were Stratton Sclavos,” (CEO of Verisign, domain name registry and registrar).  It’s longer than the essay I would have written which would have been “Stick to digital certs.”