SINFUL TRADE MARKS; TROUBLESOME COPYRIGHT


Bulge battlers do battle

The Daily Telegraph reports that two dieting companies are having a trade mark tiff. Sin & Slim is applying to register SIN & SLIM as a trade mark, but the application is being opposed by Slimming World. The latter company designated foods which can only be eaten in limited amounts as “sins”, though recently it has changed the speling to “syns”. Slimming World is claiming that it has rights in the term SIN thanks to 35 years of use (and possibly a registered trade mark, though the article’s not clear on this point). Said Slimming Word:

"Since they [Sin & Slim] have attempted to register the name as a trademark they should not be surprised nor under any illusion that any organisation that has built up years of goodwill in a trademark would not look to protect it when necessary".

The original sinful foodstuff

The IPKat says that SIN has to be the ultimate example of an immoral trade mark and, as we all know, immoral trade marks are not registrable.


9/11 Photo Copyright

The New York Daily News reports on a copyright controversy concerning publicly funded pictures of the 9/11 clean-up operation. Photographer Gregg Brown was paid $300,000 to document the aftermath of the terrorist attack, but no contract concerning ownership of the copyright in the photographs was ever signed. Brown refused to sign papers granting the copyright to the City of New York, but he was allowed continued access to NYPD helicopters, from which he filmed, until May 2002. Later in 2002, he registered his photographs and video footage with the US Copyright Office. He now says that his written permission is needed before the photographs can be used. He has caused outrage amongst the families of 9/11 survivors by including footage in a documentary named ‘Words”, which features topless women and naked men.

The IPKat reckons that this is certainly a case in which it would be justified to imply a contractual assignment of the copyright into the contract to give it business efficacy. As an ideal situation though, it’s best to sort things out expressly and contractually beforehand, though the IPKat can understand why, in this case, this may have been overlooked.

SINFUL TRADE MARKS; TROUBLESOME COPYRIGHT SINFUL TRADE MARKS; TROUBLESOME COPYRIGHT Reviewed by Anonymous on Wednesday, February 15, 2006 Rating: 5

No comments:

All comments must be moderated by a member of the IPKat team before they appear on the blog. Comments will not be allowed if the contravene the IPKat policy that readers' comments should not be obscene or defamatory; they should not consist of ad hominem attacks on members of the blog team or other comment-posters and they should make a constructive contribution to the discussion of the post on which they purport to comment.

It is also the IPKat policy that comments should not be made completely anonymously, and users should use a consistent name or pseudonym (which should not itself be defamatory or obscene, or that of another real person), either in the "identity" field, or at the beginning of the comment. Current practice is to, however, allow a limited number of comments that contravene this policy, provided that the comment has a high degree of relevance and the comment chain does not become too difficult to follow.

Learn more here: http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/p/want-to-complain.html

Powered by Blogger.