Copyright and Trademarks Podcast Lessons

            Copyright and Trademarks are two very important aspects of any business agreement. It is very important to protect those items that make a business unique so that the business continues to stand off and fight off copycats. The following podcasts took a look at these aspects and passed on some good ideas and warnings on these aspects. ARC Law Group’s Business, Entertainment, Sports, and Technology Law Blog podcast sets up the basics of a trademark. According to attorney Mark A. Pearson, a trademark could be word, design, or sound that give a person the origin of goods or services and not the goods or services alone. This gives the consumer of where the item is coming from. A totally made up word is a great trademark because it’d be hard for anyone else could be close. You can register a trademark with the US Patent and Trademark Office. Basic common law protection but really needs to be registered. The mark "™" is for common law usage of term. The mark “®” means that the trademark has gone through the application process with USPTO. This is important because it is important to research what marks are registered so that and realted trademarks cannot be used. It also means that our merchandise would not be trademarked just the fact that it’s coming from the Phishsonian.

            Entertainment Law Update’s podcast from July 5, 2012 had two interesting cases relating to trademarks. The first was that Lady Gaga wants the US Patent and Trademark office to cancel the “Gaga Pure Platinum” mark so that she can register “Lady Gaga” and “Haus of Gaga” but the cosmetic company continues to say it is in use.  This would relate to my business plan because see if there are related marks that would make it hard to trademark the name “Phishsonian”. The second case is that the University of Alabama is in a lawsuit with artist Daniel Moore over his paintings that portray moments in the school’s football team’s history. The school claims that the portrayal of the uniforms is a violation of trademark. The lawsuit found that the trademark was not infringed. This could be important in that that artwork of the museum or band may not infringe our trademarks and there would be no legal precedent to go after these items.

            The Nicholas Talks at Duke University had an interesting conversation with Kevin Smith, the director of the Office of Copyright and Scholarly Communication at Duke. He stated that short amounts of text such as quotes cannot be copyrighted but tweets can be copyrighted if unique enough.  This can be important to the business plan because social media may be used both in museum content and for marketing so it’s important copyright what is possible. January 1^st is Public Domain day. Any expired copyrights from the previous year enter the public domain. This is important to follow as it opens up what can be displayed. A big question that Smith also proposed is should our website have a Creative Commons license? Can we let people use our materials? This is a great question about how our museum is presented on the Internet. Register all copyrights as soon as required so if litigation is necessary, it will be viewed in a better light. You can register a copyright later but it weakens the case presented.