Take a look at this cover.

Now compare

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I am excited to announce that Oxford University Press has published my book, Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources. I owe a huge debt to my Madisonian colleagues for their support along the way. I will post more about the book in the next few weeks, but here are some links and a short [...]

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A few weeks ago, I posted here that if you attach a picture from movie posters on your product as a hang-tag, you will be found liable for trademark infringement every time. I later posted that it was a mistake for the props folks in the Hangover II movie to keep calling a knock-off a Louis [...]

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[DISCLAIMER: It is not long after someone meets me that they learn I’m from West Virginia.  I am fiercely proud of my home state, and a loyal Mountaineer fan.  (In fact, way back when, I got married on West Virginia’s birthday. On purpose.)  So, I am delighted to write a post about two of my [...]

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The following is a trademark disclaimer that I found in a textbook recently, although I’m not sure that ‘disclaimer’ is the correct term.  I haven’t noticed provisions drafted like this before and I’m really not sure what it’s getting at.  I’d be interested in others’ thoughts…
“All terms mentioned in this book that are known to [...]

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To follow Mike’s shift toward anti-competitiveness (and beverages):
Dublin Dr. Pepper and Dr. Pepper Snapple Group have settled their trademark licensing dispute and Dublin Dr. Pepper, the beverage darling of the Lonestar State, is no more.
Dublin Dr. Pepper is a Texas favorite.  This original Dr. Pepper was created in 1891, and its birthday is still celebrated [...]

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On behalf of the editors of JOLTI at Case Western Reserve, some readers may be interested in the following:
Call For Submissions
Case Western Reserve’s Journal of Law, Technology & the Internet is searching for a final article to publish in its spring edition. Any scholarly work related to cyber law, intellectual property law [...]

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[Updated January 15, 2012:  I changed the post title, because I am still learning that search engines dislike non-literal titles.  The original title was "'W"'Stands for Infringement."]
An emerging by-product of Pittsburgh’s claim to be a new entertainment capital (see blog post here – the claim is not entirely without merit, as a lawyer might say) [...]

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So, I read that Louis Vuitton is suing Warner Brothers for the line “Careful, that is a Louis Vuitton” in the movie “The Hangover II.” This got my hackles up – after all this IS a nominative use, unlike Bella’s Twighlight Jacket, and it is a non-trademark use – a description of the bag that’s presumably [...]

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We have received a cease and desist letter demanding that we change the name of our IP center from “Center for Law and Intellectual Property” because it infringes the rights of Fordham University’s “Center on Law and Information Policy.”  The letter also demands that we not use the acronym CLIP whatsoever in reference to our [...]

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The House Judiciary Committee held a markup hearing today on the Stop Online Piracy Act, H.R. 3261, the bill that is quickly shaping up to be this year’s big copyright battle. I’ve written two prior posts on the bill, Part I and Part II.
This is a good opportunity to recap where I came out at [...]

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I want to pick up on a topic nicely covered by Greg Lastowka — the recent case involving Bella’s jacket from the movie Twilight. Perhaps you’ve heard of it — the movie, I mean, not the case.
There is a maxim that “Hard Cases Make Bad Law.” Today I want to talk about a lesser used [...]

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I feel like I’m scooping Jacqui here, since she’s the Madisonian Twilight expert, but I was so bothered by the recent district court decision in the Bella’s Jacket Brouhaha that I’m chiming in on the intersection of intellectual property and teen vampires.
Twilight is probably part of basic 21st century cultural literacy, so I’ll presume [...]

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The Internet and “user-generated [amateur and homemade] content” have decimated much of professional porn, but the so-called “Golden Age of Porn” remains — decades later — more than a matter of historical interest.  The copyright owners of two porn “classics,” Debbie Does Dallas and Deep Throat, have settled their differences via a consent decree, each [...]

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[This is largely a comment to Alfred’s post below, but it’s long and I wanted to include some links so put it here as a separate post.  MC]
Perhaps the lawsuit Alfred discusses below could also be filed under “karma”… Last November, Twin Peaks filed a complaint here in the Northern District of Texas alleging that [...]

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Trademark scholars, take note of a trade name that could have — but did not — become generic for something truly awful, and at the instance of Thomas Edison no less.  Google, Inc. worries about consumers using “to google” as a verb.  George Westinghouse had other things to fry.  Or so Edison claimed.
In the wake [...]

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The owner of a Birmingham (UK) comedy club named “Glee” has sued 20th Century Fox, producer of the television show “Glee” (now broadcast in England) for trademark infringement.
Apparently, he has a registration for “The Glee Club,” dating from 2001, or perhaps 1999, for entertainment services.  According to the local paper:
The 43-year-old claimed the hugely-successful series [...]

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Oh my, as Dick Enberg (or was it Dorothy Gale?) would say.
A federal magistrate judge in Louisiana granted a defense motion for summary judgment the other day in a case brought by Firefly Digital against Google, seeking to enforce Firefly’s “Gadget” mark, and some related marks (”Website Gadget”) registered at both federal and state levels, with [...]

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Here is an update to my recent post about the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Terrible Towel trademark and my questions about the validity of the mark in view of the (i) licensing relationship between the owner of the mark (the Allegheny Valley School) and the licensee of the mark (the Steelers), which appears to be entirely appropriate [...]

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The Terrible Towel trademark is on the move again.
The Terrible Towel is a Pittsburgh Steelers tradition.  It’s a piece of cheap yellow (or gold) terrycloth emblazoned with a “Terrible Towel” (TT) logo; Steelers fans twirl the towels by the thousands whenever and wherever the team plays.
Earlier this year, when the owner of the TT mark [...]

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